Last updated: 16 October 2008

Rion L. Snow

Contact Info: http://ai.stanford.edu/~rion

Research and Professional Experience

Researcher, Stanford AI Lab & NLP Group January 2004 - Present
Supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms for natural language processing, automatic semantic relation identification, semantic taxonomy induction.
http://robotics.stanford.edu, http://nlp.stanford.edu

Natural Language Processing Consultant, Powerset June 2007 - September 2007
Lexical ontology integration and evaluation, word sense disambiguation.
http://blog.powerset.com/

Research Intern, Google Research June 2006 - September 2006
Ontology normalization, schema matching, applications of graphical models for database mapping.
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com

Research Intern, Microsoft Research NLP Group June 2005 - September 2005
Recognizing textual entailment, applications of automatically-constructed semantic taxonomies (MindNet).
http://research.microsoft.com/nlp/

Analytic Scientist, Fair Isaac Corporation July 2001 - August 2003
Application of long-term context in text, statistical models for natural language processing, parallel processing architectures.
Fair Isaac Exploratory R&D Homepage

Researcher, Institute for Neural Computation, UCSD June 2001 - June 2002
Modeling of the stomatogastric ganglion, computational neuroscience, distinguishing chaos and noise in neural systems, dynamics of motor behavior.
http://inc.ucsd.edu

Programmer, Conceptual Immunology Lab, Salk Institute August 2000 - July 2001
Modeling of the immune system, applied cellular automata for antibody-antigen simulation, synthetic immune system (SIS).
http://cig.salk.edu

Researcher, Computational Neurobiology Lab, Salk Institute August 2000 - July 2001
Parallel architectures, Monte Carlo simulation of microcellular physiology, molecular-level neural modeling, applied physics and mathematics.
http://www.mcell.cnl.salk.edu

Lab Assistant, Molecular Biology and Virology Lab, Salk Institute January 2000 - August 2000
Preparations for yeast genetics, DNA replication, chromosome dynamics.
http://pingu.salk.edu/~forsburg

Education

Stanford University, Department of Computer Science 2005 - present
Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science.
Advisor: Andrew Ng.
Co-advisor: Daniel Jurafsky.

Stanford University, Department of Computer Science 2003 - 2005
Master of Science, with Distinction in Research.
Specialization in Artificial Intelligence.

University of California, San Diego, Department of Mathematics 1999 - 2002
Bachelor of Arts, Cum Laude.

Teaching Experience

Course Assistant for CS 229: "Machine Learning", Stanford University, Autumn 2005.

Teaching Assistant and Guest Lecturer for CS 224S / Linguistics 281: "Speech Recognition and Synthesis", Stanford University, Winter 2005.

Teaching Assistant and Guest Lecturer for ECE 173: "Theory and Applications of Neural Networks and Fuzzy Logic", University of California, San Diego, Spring 2002

Teaching Assistant for "Mathematics for Neuroscientists", University of California, San Diego, Summer 2001
A special 10-week summer course for UCSD Computational Neurobiology graduate students.

Awards and Honors

Best Paper Award for "Semantic Taxonomy Induction", COLING/ACL-2006.
National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship (2003 - Present)
National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (2003 - 2006)
University of California Regents Fellowship (1999 - 2002)
National Merit Scholarship (1999 - 2002)
Robert C. Byrd Scholarship (1999 - 2002)
Madge E. Lawhead Scholarship (2001 - 2002)
Provost's Honors (2000 - 2001)

Selected Publications

Snow, R., O'Connor, B., Jurafsky, D., and Ng, A. Y. "Cheap and Fast - But is it Good? Evaluating Non-Expert Annotations for Natural Language Tasks", Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2008.

McNamee, P., Snow, R., Schone, P., and Mayfield, J. "Learning Named Entity Hyponyms for Question Answering", Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, 2008.

Snow, R., Prakash, S., Jurafsky, D., and Ng, A. Y. "Learning to merge word senses", Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2007.

Snow, R., Jurafsky, D., and Ng, A. Y. "Semantic taxonomy induction from heterogenous evidence", Proceedings of COLING / Association for Computational Linguistics, 2006. Received Best Paper Award.

Snow, R., Vanderwende, L., and Menezes, A. "Effectively using syntax for recognizing false entailment", Proceedings of Human Language Technology / North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2006.

Benton, J., Snow, R., and Wallach, N. "A combinatorial problem associated with nonograms", Linear Algebra and its Applications 412 pp. 30-38, 2006.

Snow, R., Jurafsky, D., and Ng, A. Y. "Learning syntactic patterns for automatic hypernym discovery", Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 17, 2005.

Means, R., Snow, R., et al. "Build-a-Brain Experiment Kit", HNC Software Inc., 2002.

Snow, R. "Efficient Generation of Hierarchical Representations in Cortronic Networks", UCSD Faculty Mentor Research Symposium 2002 Proceedings, 2002.

Snow, R. "Handbook of Cortronics Pseudocode", HNC Technical Paper, 2002.

Snow, R. "Knowledge Representation in Associative Memory Neural Models", HHUSEP, UCSD Undergraduate Summer Research Conference 2001 Proceedings, 2001.

Selected Posters

Snow, R. et al. "Induction of a WordNet-like Ontology from Unstructured Text", Stanford Computer Forum, 18 May 2004.

Snow, R. et al. "Semantic Structure of the English Language", Fair Isaac InterACT Conference, San Diego, California, 6 June 2003.

Rowat, P., Elson, R., Snow, R. "Bursting dynamics in the stomatogastric nervous system", CNS 2001, Pacific Grove, California, 5 July 2001.