Alexander M. Fraser

Short Bio in Third Person

Alexander Fraser is a full professor at the Center for Information and Language Processing, LMU Munich, where he leads the Multilingual Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation Group. Before that, he led the Machine Translation Group at the Institute for Natural Language Processing at the University of Stuttgart. He is also a PI in the Munich Center for Machine Learning.

He has received two European Research Council grants and was a PI of the Horizon 2020 "Health in my Language" project. His main research interests are in multilingual representation learning, machine translation, syntactic parsing and information retrieval.

Alex obtained his PhD in 2007 from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. His PhD research was conducted at the Information Sciences Institute in the Intelligent Systems Division. In addition to his academic work, Alex has worked at Language Weaver, where he developed the first commercially-available statistical machine translation system, and at BBN Technologies, where he worked on Arabic monolingual and cross-language information retrieval. Before starting his PhD studies, Alex held a number of positions including technical director at SatelLife/HealthNet, working on digital infrastructure for health information in developing countries.

Long Bio in First Person

I am a full professor at the Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS), LMU Munich, where I lead the Multilingual Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation Group. Before this, I led the Machine Translation Group at the Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS), University of Stuttgart. I am also a PI in the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML).

I have received two European Research Council grants and was a PI in the Horizon2020 project Health in my Language (HimL). My main research interests are in multilingual representation learning, machine translation, syntactic parsing and information retrieval. In general I am interested in the intersection between natural language processing and machine learning.

I defended my PhD in July 2007. I was in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, located in Los Angeles. The topic of my dissertation 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 worked at Language Weaver where I managed the development of a machine translation system which automatically creates high quality English translations of Arabic documents. This was the first commercially-available statistical machine translation system, available almost two years before Google Translate. 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. In the summer of 2012, I had the opportunity to return to lead a group (together with Marine Carpuat, Hal Daume and Chris Quirk) working on the problem of Domain Adaptation in Statistical Machine Translation, which was a great experience.

I have also worked at BBN Technologies, in the Speech and Language Processing Group. My last project there was a cross-language 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 was the technical director at an NGO (non-profit) called SatelLife which involved work on ICTs for public health, where I managed the international HealthNet network and created the technical infrastructure for ProMED-mail. This 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 fluently, and am proficient in Arabic. 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.