About

Hi! I am a PhD candidate in JHU's Department of Computer Science and Center for Language and Speech Processing. I work with my advisor David Yarowsky on NLP across thousands of languages, with a focus on low-resource languages. Most of my research has been on multilinguality, historical linguistics, and machine translation but I occasionally dabble in other fields.

I received a BS in computer science as a Turing Scholar and BA in Latin from UT Austin, where I worked with Katrin Erk on computational semantics. I received my MSE in computer science from JHU in 2017. I am planning to graduate this year!

You can reach me at wswu at jhu dot edu

Teaching

I like teaching. I'm the instructor for EN 500.111 - Multilingual Natural Language Processing (Fall 2019, Fall 2020), a new HEART course I designed to introduce freshmen to research in multilingual NLP. This class is suitable for students right out of high school, with no background in linguistics, math, or computer science.

I have also been the teaching assistant for EN 601.466/666 - Information Retrieval and Web Agents (Spring 2018, Spring 2019, and Spring 2021).

I also have experience teaching piano lessons and Latin.

At JHU, I help organize North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad events. This is a yearly national competition for middle school and high school students. We host a competition every year and do outreach to local schools.

Publications

See my Publications page.

Music

I am also an avid musician. I was one of the winners of the Hopkins Symphony Orchestra Concerto Competition in 2016. I am the founder and president of the JHU Piano Club, and I also play the erhu and arrange music for the Hopkins Oriental Music Ensemble.

I have also won several awards with music-related projects at recent hackathons including PeabodyHacks 2019, PeabodyHacks 2020, and Hophacks 2020