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Mathematics and Computer Science

  •  Headshot of Alvin Grissom II

Alvin C. Grissom II

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

I am a computational linguist who does research at the intersection of computational linguistics and machine learning. 

Department

Math/Computer Science

Degrees

B.A., Hendrix College

M.S., Emory University

Ph.D., University of Colorado Boulder

Teaching

Fall 2019:

  • CS-174 Object Oriented Programming
  • CS-477 Artificial Intelligence

Spring 2019:

  • CS-374 Principles of Programming Languages
  • CS-371W Data Structures and Algorithms
  • CS-174 Object-oriented Programming

Fall 2018:

  • Deep Computer Vision and Language
  • CS-373 Theory of Computation

Spring 2018:

  • CS-174 Object-oriented Programming
  • CS-474 Human-Computer Interaction

 Fall 2017:

  • CS-173 Introduction to Computer Science
  • CS-477 Artificial Intelligence

  

Professional Experience

CV

Research Interests

Much of my recent research has focused on machine learning-based approaches to incremental language processing with applications to simultaneous machine translation and computational psycholinguistics.

I am also interested in Japanese language processing, corpus linguistics, and modeling bias.

Since I’m at a liberal arts institution, I’m also interested in having conversations about how machine learning can be applied to other areas of inquiry.

Recent Work

Keynote talk at Widening NLP (WiNLP) Workshop 2019 [Video]

Jack Merullo, Luke Yeh, Abram Handler, Alvin Grissom II, Brendan O’Connor, Mohit Iyyer. Investigating Sports Commentator Bias within a Large Corpus of American Football Broadcasts (to appear). EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019, Hong Kong, China.

Shi Feng, Eric Wallace, Alvin Grissom II, Mohit Iyyer, Pedro Rodriguez, and Jordan Boyd-Graber. Pathologies of Neural Models Make Interpretations Difficult. EMNLP 2018 (24%), Brussels, Belgium. [Video][Interview (Alvin Grissom II)][Interview (Shi Feng)]

Yoshinari Fujinuma and Alvin C. Grissom II. Substring Frequency Features for Segmentation of Japanese Katakana Words with Unlabeled Corpora. IJCNLP 2017, Taipei, Taiwan. (31%)

Alvin C. Grissom II, Naho Orita, and Jordan Boyd-Graber. Incremental Prediction of Sentence-final Verbs. CoNLL 2016, Berlin, Germany. (20%) [Video]

He He, Alvin C. Grissom II, Jordan Boyd-Graber, and Hal Daumé III. Syntax-based Reordering for Simultaneous Machine Translation. EMNLP 2015, Lisbon, Protrugal. (24%) [Video] [Slides]

Alvin C. Grissom II, He He, Jordan Boyd-Graber, John Morgan, and Hal Daumé III. Don’t Until the Final Verb Wait: Reinforcement Learning for Simultaneous Machine Translation. EMNLP 2014., Doha, Qatar. (30%) [Video][Slides]

Years of Service to Ursinus

2017-Present