Abstract

My first thanks must go to Fernando Pereira. He was a wonderful advisor, and every aspect of this thesis has benefitted from his insight. At times I was a difficult, even unruly graduate student, and Fernando had patience with all my ideas, whether good or bad. What I’ll miss most, though, is the quick trip to Fernando’s office, coming away with new insights on everything from numerical underflow to the state of the academic community in machine learning and NLP. In addition to Fernando, this thesis was shaped by a great committee. Having Ben Taskar as committee chairman has given me the perfect excuse to interrupt his workday with new, ostensibly-thesis-related machine learning ideas. Mark Liberman and Mitch Marcus brought a much-needed linguistic perspective to a thesis on language, and many of the techniques described are based on work by Tong Zhang, who kindly served as my external committee member. Although he didn’t directly serve on my committee, Shai Ben-David got me started on the theoretical aspects of this work, and chapter 4 grew out of work I co-authored with him. I was also fortunate to have a great academic family. With brothers (and one sister!)

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