Alexander Fraser leads the statistical machine translation group at the Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS) at the University of Stuttgart in Southern Germany. He is PI of a German Research Foundation project which is on modeling morphosyntactic phenomena in statistical approaches to machine translation. Previously he worked with Hinrich Schuetze on syntactic parsing. His main research interests are in statistical 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 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, in 1995 from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. In addition to his work at USC/ISI and the University of Stuttgart, 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-lingual information retrieval.
I am at the Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart, in Southern Germany. I am PI of a DFG project which is on modeling morphosyntactic phenomena in statistical approaches to machine translation. Before that, I worked with Hinrich Schuetze in the SFB 732 research project, from November 2007 through September 2009, where I focused on syntactic parsing.
I defended my PhD in July, 2007. I was in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, which is located in Los Angeles. The topic was Improved Word Alignments for Statistical Machine Translation and my advisor was Daniel Marcu. In addition to Daniel, Eduard Hovy, Gareth James, Kevin Knight and Paul Rosenbloom were on my committee. I obtained my M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 2002, and my B.A. in Computer Science and Economics, with a concentration in Linguistics, in 1995 from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
During my PhD studies I worked on statistical machine translation in the Natural Language Group at the Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey (near Los Angeles). We used statistical models to implement machine translation from a variety of languages to English. I also worked on discourse analysis.
From June 2003 to May 2004 I had a one year contract at Language Weaver where I managed the development of a machine translation system which automatically creates high quality English translations of Arabic documents. Managing the transfer of research technology into a commercial product, which had to be robust, was a useful experience very different from the issues in academic laboratories.
In the summer of 2003, I took part in an interesting workshop on Syntax for Statistical Machine Translation at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Our group was led by Franz Och and Dan Gildea and our goal was to incorporate syntactic structure into a phrase-based statistical machine translation system.
I have also worked at BBN Technologies, in the Speech and Language Processing Group. My last project there was a cross-lingual information retrieval system where the queries were in English and the documents searched were in Arabic.
I used to work in the area of International Development, providing technical assistance to developing countries, and I am still strongly interested in this area and in development economics. I managed projects for a NGO (non-profit) called SatelLife which involved work on location in a number of countries in Eastern, Western and Southern Africa, as well as Bolivia and Haiti.
Travel is one of my interests, I've spent significant time in Germany, Spain, France, Mexico, Yemen and Syria. I speak English, French, German and Spanish, so feel free to write me in any of these languages. You can also write in Arabic, but you will probably wait longer for a response. I also have a personal web site which primarily contains information on studying Arabic that I gathered during my year-long stay in the Middle East in 1998.