Brooke Cowan Post-Doctoral Associate MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory 32 Vassar Street, 32-G480 Cambridge, MA 02139 I finished at MIT in June 2009.

About

I am a post-doctoral associate at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with a half-time teaching, half-time research appointment. I am currently teaching 6.01, Introduction to EECS 1 with Leslie Kaelbling, Tomas Lozano-Perez, Denny Freeman, Antonio Torralba, Joel Dawson, and Berthold Horn, and others.

In June 2008, I finished my PhD thesis under the supervision of Michael Collins. My doctoral thesis research was the area of in statistical natural language processing, in particular machine translation and parsing. In January 2004, I finished my master's thesis on natural language generation with Stephanie Seneff of the Spoken Language Systems Group.

Before I started graduate school, I spent a year teaching Spanish at the Keys School before deciding to become a credentialed teacher through UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education. I then spent two years teaching in a Spanish immersion program at Hatch Elementary School in Half Moon Bay, CA.

I graduated with a B.A. in American Studies from Stanford University.

Research

• Syntax-Based Statistical Machine Translation
  The focus of my PhD thesis was to develop a German-to-English statistical machine translation system. The system made use of automatically-generated parse trees of both the source-language input and the target-language output. During the training phase, the model learned a statistical mapping between the source language syntax and the target language syntax using pairs of parsed German and English sentences as training data. These statistics helped the model predict the syntactic structure of the output during the testing phase. Many of the ideas in the thesis were inspired by linguistic tree-adjoining grammar theory.
  
  
• Statistical Syntactic Parsing
  I also built a statistical syntactic parser for Spanish as part of my PhD work. The parser extended my advisor Michael Collins' English-language parser. The Spanish version allowed the model to take into account the morphological features of nouns, adjectives, determiners, and so on when making probabilistic decisions about Spanish syntax.
  
  
• Moses Statistical Machine Translation System
  I was part of the 2006 Johns Hopkins Summer NLP Workshop team that implemented Moses, an open-source, factor-based machine translation system inpired by Philipp Koehn's phrase-based Pharaoh decoder. I worked on factor-based experiments involving Spanish-to-English translation.
  
  
• Natural Language Generation
  For my master's thesis, I designed and implemented a scripting language for use by researchers in the the Spoken Language Systems Group at MIT. The scripting language gave developers a mechanism for specifying rules related to the underlying frame-based representation in a large-scale spoken-language recognition and generation system. Since the completion of the project, developers have used the scripting language for tasks such as spoken language translation and foreign language learning.
  
  
• Chicano Narrative
  As an undergraduate, I wrote my honor's thesis on two works by the Mexican-American writer Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation.

Publications

Brooke Cowan, 2008. A Tree-to-Tree Model for Statistical Machine Translation. PhD Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (You can also check out the slides from my thesis defense.)

Philipp Koehn, Nicola Bertoldi, Ondrej Bojar, Chris Callison-Burch, Alexandra Constantin, Brooke Cowan, Chris Dyer, Marcello Federico, Evan Herbst, Hieu Hoang, Christine Moran, Wade Shen, and Richard Zens, 2007. Open Source Toolkit for Statistical Machine Translation: Factored Translation Models and Confusion Network Decoding. CLSP Summer Workshop Final Report WS-2006, Johns Hopkins University. (You can also see the ACL-2007 demo paper on the Moses toolkit for a short description of the software.)

Brooke Cowan, Ivona Kučerová, and Michael Collins, 2006. A Discriminative Model for Tree-to-Tree Translation. In Proceedings of EMNLP-2006.

Brooke Cowan and Michael Collins, 2005. Morphology and Reranking for the Statistical Parsing of Spanish. In Proceedings of EMNLP-2005.

Brooke Cowan, 2004. PLUTO: A Preprocessor for Multilingual Spoken Language Generation. Master's Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Teaching

• Instructor, 6.01: Introduction to EECS 1, MIT, Cambridge, MA, Spring 2009 with Leslie Kaelbling, Tomas Lozano-Perez, Denny Freeman, Antonio Torralba, Joel Dawson, and Berthold Horn.
• Supervisor, SP.268: The Mathematics of Toys and Games, a cool Experimental Study Group class at MIT taught in Spring 2009 by two of my former 6.042 students, Melissa Gymrek and Jing Li.
• Post-Doctoral Lecturer, 6.042: Math for Computer Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, Fall 2008 with Tom Leighton and Marten Van Dijk.
  
• Teaching Assistant, 6.034: Artificial Intelligence, MIT, Cambridge, MA, Spring 2004 with Leslie Kaelbling and Tomas Lozano-Perez
  
• Teacher, 4th and 5th Grade Spanish Immersion Program, Hatch Elementary School, Half Moon Bay, CA, 1997-1999
  
• Student Teacher, English and ESL, Pinole Valley High School and El Cerrito High School, Contra Costa County, CA, 1996-1997
  
• Teacher, Spanish grades 1-8, Keys School, Palo Alto, CA, 1995-1996
  
• Teacher, Mamá Program, Guadalajara, Mexico, Fall 1994 (International Partnership for Service Learning) and Summer 1995
  
• Teacher, Summerbridge Program, New Orleans, LA and San Francisco, CA, Summer 1991 and Summer 1989
  

Tutoring and Mentoring

• Undergraduate Mentor, MIT, 2005-2008 (I mentored two undergraduates at MIT, one who worked with me as a UROP during the summer of 2005. She graduated in June 2008 and is now working at Oracle. The other student adapted my German-to-English translation system to Chinese for his Masters of Engineering project. He also finished in June 2008.)
• Marin Tutors, Marin County, CA, 1999-2000 (This was a private tutoring business I started. I tutored some 10 to 20 students once or twice weekly in their homes.)
  
• Tutor, Catholic Worker House, Redwood City, CA, 1993-1995 (While I was in college, I tutored two Mexican immigrant high-school students.)
  

Awards

• MIT Clare Boothe Luce Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Fall 2008
  
• NSF-Johns Hopkins Post-CLSP Workshop Grant Recipient, 2006-2007
  
• Departmental Honors and Distinction, American Studies Department, Stanford University, 1994
  
• Phi Beta Kappa, 1993
  

Last updated: February 2011