Hey there, I'm Alex! I'm a software engineer, researcher, and educator in natural language processing. Currently I'm a lecturer at the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz.
Recently, I did a batch at the Recurse Center, and not too long ago I was an applied scientist at Etsy. Before that, I was at Google for many years, where I worked on Google Translate and a few other things, including interning with the speech recognition group at Google Research and working on developer tools like GWT and the related IDE support.
I did my doctorate at Indiana University with Michael Gasser and Sandra Kübler, working on tools for machine translation for under-resourced languages. I'm excited about improving translation for these under-resourced and under-represented languages, both by simply collecting more training data, and through making better use of the training data that we already have. I also occasionally contribute to NLTK.