Chris Callison-Burch

Computer Science Department

Johns Hopkins University

3400 N. Charles Street (CSEB 226-B)

Baltimore, MD 21218

Tel: 1 410 516 3427 (office)

Tel: 1 267 909 2668 (mobile)

email: ccb@cs

jhu

edu

Current Information

I am an assistant research professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins University. My research interests include statistical machine translation, data-driven paraphrasing, and evaluation metrics.

I help to organize the annual Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT), which has several shared tasks to evaluate the quality of machine translation, system combination techniques, and automatic evaluation metrics. In 2009, I also served on the board of AMTA, helped to start the ACL SIGMT, and co-organized the TextInfer workshop.

My research group is currently developing Joshua, an open source decoder for statistical machine translation, which uses synchronous context free grammars.

I recently released software for generating paraphrases from parallel corpora.

Research Group

My research group currently has a dozen people:

1st year PhD students: Juri Ganitkevitch, Courtney Napoles
2nd year master's student: Jonny Weese
2nd year PhD students: Byung Gyu Ahn, Ann Irvine
Senior PhD students: Zhifei Li, Lane Schwartz, Omar Zaidan
Postdoc: Alex Klementiev
Software developer: James Dennis
Visiting students: Abby Levenberg, Rui Wang

Publications

Fast, Cheap, and Creative: Evaluating Translation Quality Using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Chris Callison-Burch, 2009. In Proceedings of EMNLP 2009.
I convinced my friend Joel Rose to do a story about Mechanical Turk on NPR's Marketplace. His angle was people supplementing their income in the weak economy. Next time: translation.

Feasibility of Human-in-the-loop Minimum Error Rate Training. Omar Zaidan and Chris Callison-Burch, 2009. In Proceedings of EMNLP 2009.

Improved Statistical Machine Translation Using Monolingually-Derived Paraphrases. Yuval Marton, Chris Callison-Burch and Philip Resnik, 2009. In Proceedings of EMNLP 2009.

Improving Translation Lexicon Induction from Monolingual Corpora via Dependency Contexts and Part-of-Speech Equivalences. Nikesh Garera, Chris Callison-Burch and David Yarowsky, 2009. In Proceedings of the Conference on Natural Language Learning (CoNLL). [poster]

Findings of the 2009 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation. In Proceedings of Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT09). Chris Callison-Burch, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz and Josh Schroeder, 2009. [slides]

Joshua: An Open Source Toolkit for Parsing-based Machine Translation. Zhifei Li, Chris Callison-Burch, Chris Dyer, Juri Ganitkevitch, Sanjeev Khudanpur, Lane Schwartz, Wren Thornton, Jonathan Weese and Omar Zaidan, 2009. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT09). [slides] [keynote]

Decoding in Joshua: Open Source, Parsing-Based Machine Translation. Zhifei Li, Chris Callison-Burch, Sanjeev Khudanpur, and Wren Thornton, 2009. In The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics (PBML), Number 91, January 2009.

Syntactic Constraints on Paraphrases Extracted from Parallel Corpora. Chris Callison-Burch, 2008. In Proceedings of EMNLP 2008. [slides]
I have released a HOWTO guide for extracting paraphrases that includes links to the software and complete data sets that I used in my EMNLP paper.

ParaMetric: An Automatic Evaluation Metric for Paraphrasing. Chris Callison-Burch, Trevor Cohn, Mirella Lapata, 2008. In Proceedings of CoLing 2008. [slides] [keynote]

Further Meta-Evaluation of Machine Translation. In Proceedings of ACL-2008 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation. Chris Callison-Burch, Cameron Fordyce, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz and Josh Schroeder, 2008. [slides]
Note: corrected subsequent to publication.

Constructing Corpora for the Development and Evaluation of Paraphrase Systems. Trevor Cohn, Chris Callison-Burch, Mirella Lapata, 2008. Computational Linguistics: Volume 34, Number 4.

Affinity Measures based on the Graph Laplacian. Delip Rao, David Yarowsky, Chris Callison-Burch, 2008. In Proceedings of Proceedings of the 3rd Textgraphs workshop on Graph-based Algorithms for Natural Language Processing at CoLing 2008.

Paraphrasing and Translation. Chris Callison-Burch, 2007. PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh. [slides]

(Meta-) Evaluation of Machine Translation. In Proceedings of ACL-2007 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation. Chris Callison-Burch, Cameron Fordyce, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz and Josh Schroeder, 2007. [slides]

Open Source Toolkit for Statistical Machine Translation: Factored Translation Models and Confusion Network Decoding. 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. CLSP Summer Workshop Final Report WS-2006, Johns Hopkins University. (You can also see our ACL-2007 demo paper on the Moses toolkit for a short description of the software.)

Paraphrase Substitution for Recognizing Textual Entailment. Wauter Bosma and Chris Callison-Burch, 2007. In Evaluation of Multilingual and Multimodal Information Retrieval, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, C. Peters et al editors.

Improved Statistical Machine Translation Using Paraphrases. Chris Callison-Burch, Philipp Koehn and Miles Osborne, 2006. In Proceedings NAACL-2006. [slides]

Re-evaluating the Role of Bleu in Machine Translation Research. Chris Callison-Burch, Miles Osborne and Philipp Koehn, 2006. In Proceedings of EACL-2006. [slides]

Constraining the Phrase-Based, Joint Probability Statistical Translation Model. Alexandra Birch, Chris Callison-Burch and Miles Osborne, 2006. In Proceedings of AMTA-2006. [slides]

Scaling Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation to Larger Corpora and Longer Phrases. Chris Callison-Burch, Colin Bannard and Josh Schroeder, 2005. In Proceedings of ACL-2005. [slides]

Paraphrasing with Bilingual Parallel Corpora. Colin Bannard and Chris Callison-Burch, 2005. In Proceedings of ACL-2005. [slides]

A Compact Data Structure for Searchable Translation Memories. Chris Callison-Burch, Colin Bannard and Josh Schroeder, 2005. In Proceedings of EAMT-2005. [slides]

Linear B System Description for the 2005 NIST MT Evaluation Exercise. Chris Callison-Burch, 2005. In Proceedings of Machine Translation Evaluation Workshop. [slides]

Edinburgh System Description for the 2005 IWSLT Speech Translation Evaluation. Philipp Koehn, Amittai Axelrod, Alexandra Birch Mayne, Chris Callison-Burch, Miles Osborne, and David Talbot, 2005. In Proceedings of International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation.

Statistical Machine Translation with Word- and Sentence-Aligned Parallel Corpora. Chris Callison-Burch, David Talbot and Miles Osborne, 2004. In Proceedings of ACL-2004. [slides]

Searchable Translation Memories. In Proceedings of ASLIB Translating and the Computer 26. Chris Callison-Burch, Colin Bannard and Josh Schroeder, 2004. [slides]

Improved Statistical Translation Through Editing. Chris Callison-Burch, Colin Bannard and Josh Schroeder, 2004. In European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT-2004) Workshop. [slides]

Statistical Natural Language Processing Chris Callison-Burch and Miles Osborne, 2003. In A Handbook for Language Engineers Ali Farghaly, Editor.

Bootstrapping Parallel Corpora. Chris Callison-Burch and Miles Osborne, 2003 In NAACL workshop "Building and Using Parallel Texts: Data Driven Machine Translation and Beyond". [slides]

Co-training for Statistical Machine Translation. Chris Callison-Burch and Miles Osborne, 2003. In Proceedings of the 6th Annual CLUK Research Colloquium.

Evaluating Question Answering Systems Using FAQ Answer Injection. Jochen Leidner and Chris Callison-Burch, 2003. In Proceedings of the 6th Annual CLUK Research Colloquium.

Co-Training for Statistical Machine Translation. Chris Callison-Burch, 2002. Master's thesis, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. [slides]

Upping the Ante for "Best of Breed" Machine Translation Providers. Chris Callison-Burch, 2001. In Proceedings of ASLIB Translating and the Computer 23, London, England.

A program for automatically selecting the best output from multiple machine translation engines. Chris Callison-Burch and Raymond Flournoy, 2001. In Proceedings of the Machine Translation Summit VIII, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Secondary Benefits of Feedback and User Interaction in Machine Translation Tools. Raymond Flournoy and Chris Callison-Burch, 2001. Workshop paper for "MT2010: Towards a Roadmap for MT" of the MT Summit VIII.

A Computer Model of a Grammar for English Questions. Chris Callison-Burch, 2000. Undergraduate thesis, Symbolic Systems Program, Stanford University. My undergraduate advisor was Ivan Sag. [handout]