User:Fraser

Alexander Fraser leads the machine translation group at the Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS), University of Munich (LMU Muenchen). Before that, he led the statistical machine translation group at the Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS) at the University of Stuttgart. He is PI of a German Research Foundation project which is on modeling morphosyntactic phenomena in statistical approaches to machine translation, and was deputy PI in the EU FP 7 project, TTC - Terminology Extraction, Translation Tools and Comparable Corpora. Previously he worked with Hinrich Schuetze on syntactic parsing. His main research interests are in machine learning-based and hybrid approaches to machine translation, information retrieval and syntactic parsing.

Alex obtained a PhD in 2007 from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. The topic of his dissertation was "Improved Word Alignments for Statistical Machine Translation" and his advisor was Daniel Marcu of the Information Sciences Institute. Eduard Hovy, Gareth James, Kevin Knight and Paul Rosenbloom were also on his committee. He obtained a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 2002, and a B.A. in Computer Science and Economics, with a concentration in Linguistics, from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, in 1995. In addition to his academic work, Alex has worked at Language Weaver and at BBN Technologies, where he developed the first commercially available statistical machine translation system and worked on Arabic monolingual and cross-language information retrieval.