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Constantine Lignos Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics Email: lastname at brandeis dot edu
Lab GitHub: @BLTLab |
I direct the Broadening Linguistic Technologies Lab at Brandeis University, where I am affiliated with the Michtom School of Computer Science, and the Computational Linguistics Program. The overarching goal of my research is to broaden the depth and breadth of human language technology, with a focus on understudied problems in computational linguistics.
The primary thrust of my current work is eliminating the barriers to useful language technology for every living written language, especially lower-resourced and minoritized languages. I have previously worked on human-robot interaction and the representation of language in the mind, including language acquisition, processing, and change.
I did my graduate work in Computer Science at The University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. 2013), advised by Mitch Marcus and Charles Yang. I then completed a post-doctoral fellowship at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia exploring clinical applications of statistical models of language processing. I was a researcher at BBN Technologies and USC Information Sciences Institute. In summer 2019, I joined the computational linguistics faculty at Brandeis University.
Latest news
At LREC-COLING 2024
I’ve got three publications at LREC-COLING 2024:
ParaNames 1.0: Creating an Entity Name Corpus for 400+ Languages Using Wikidata: GitHub, Poster
CoNLL#: Fine-grained Error Analysis and a Corrected Test Set for CoNLL-03 English: GitHub, Poster
QueryNER: Segmentation of E-commerce Queries: GitHub, Poster
Reach out if you want to meet me there!
On Leave
I’m on parental leave for spring and summer 2023! This website will receive fewer updates this year and will eventually be replaced with something appropriate for this decade.
Software
My lab's software and resource releases are on the BLT Lab's GitHub page.
SeqScore: a Python package for evaluating named entity recognition (NER) and other chunking tasks.
MORSEL: a cognitively-motivated state-of-the-art unsupervised morphological analyzer I developed for Morpho Challenge 2010. It achieved state-of-the-art results in English and Finnish.
Codeswitchador: a system for identifying code-switching in social media data. This work enables the creation of large scale corpora of code-switching and identification of bilingual users. I developed this as a participant of the SCALE summer workshop at the Johns Hopkins Center of Excellence in Human Language Technology.
My older projects are available on my personal GitHub page.
Teaching
My current teaching at Brandeis includes introductory and advanced courses in computational linguistics. My course materials are all posted on the Brandeis LATTE learning management system, but names of courses I've taught recently are available on my Brandeis ScholarWorks page.
In the past I have taught researchers to write great Python code. The notes for the bootcamps I've done are available at Python Boot Camp for Researchers.
I used to maintain a list of common mistakes that programmers new to Python make: Anti-Patterns in Python Coding. It's now outdated, but still has some good content.
In Spring 2011 and 2012, I taught one of the CIS department's "mini-courses," Python Programming (CIS 192).
In the past I've also led some informal groups for learning Python. The slides from those groups can be found on my Python for Language Researchers Site.