John Tinsley
PhD Student
National Centre for Language Technology

Hello

"Researchers and scientists are working away in laboratories. They are responsible individuals, not at all unbalanced, as many believe."
- A quote from a session of the European Parliament in Nov. 2001

Me and the Acropolis in Athens, Greece

Short Bio

My name is John Tinsley. I'm a Ph.D. student at the National Centre for Language Technology in DCU. My research is in the area of Machine Translation (MT), more specifically syntax-motivated SMT, phrase-based MT, Tree Alignment, and Parallel Treebanking amongst other things. My thesis topic focuses on the feasibility of using syntactically motivated data - phrase pairs, grammar rules etc. - within various frameworks of MT and under what conditions usability is optimal. I'm under the supervision of Prof. Andy Way. I received my BSc. in Applied Computational Linguistics from DCU in 2006.

 

Latest news

2009
  • Oct 15 - Paper accepted to the 3rd workshop on EBMT! See publications
  • Oct 9 - I am on the programme committee for the MT Journal Special Issue on Pushing the frontier of Statistical Machine Translation
  • Aug 26-30 - Attended MT Summit in Ottawa, Canada
  • July 28 - Thesis writing is super-fun (!)
  • June 22 - Article accepted for Machine Translation journal! See publications
  • May 14-15 - Attended EAMT conference at the UPC in Barcelona.
  • Apr 30 - Submitted a paper to MT Summit
  • Mar 5 - I presented our paper Parallel Treebanks in Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation at CICLing-09 in Mexico City. Slides here
  • Mar 1-7 - Attending CICLing-09 at the IPN in Mexico City
  • Feb 23 - I gave an extended version of my CICLing talk at the NCLT Seminar Series in DCU. Slides here
  • Jan 13 - I gave a talk entitled "Parallel Treebanks in MT" at the MT Lunch Seminar in CMU. Slides here
  • Jan 12 - I am in the LTI in CMU until Feb 5th working with Alon Lavie's group
2008
  • Dec 15 - Paper accepted to CICLing! See publications
  • Dec 3 - I came 2nd in our Christmas Karting Grand Prix. Ventsi won, boo to him.
  • Oct 20 - Presented our poster at IWSLT with Yanjun Ma
  • Oct 18-31 - Attending IWSLT/AMTA/EMNLP in Honolulu, Hawai'i
  • Sep 29 - Along with Declan Groves of Traslán, I launched a new redesigned webpage for the EAMT, found here
  • Aug 20 - Paper accepted to IWSLT! See publications
  • Apr 21 - I successfully negotiated my PhD transfer process
  • Apr 14 - Paper accepted to WMT! See publications
  • Apr 3 - Submitted paper entitled MaTrEx: the DCU Machine Translation System for WMT-08 to WMT-08
  • March 28 - Paper accepted to TALN! See publications
  • March 6 - I am the new webmaster and MT-list admin for the European Association for Machine Translations (EAMT)
  • February 20 - I am tutoring lab sessions for CA106 - Web Design Course notes can here found here
  • February 18 - Submitted paper entitled Comparing Constituency and Dependency Representations for SMT Phrase-Extraction to TALN with Mary and Sylwia
  • January 22 - The DCU main page features an article here regarding the Microsoft Postgraduate Research Scholarships, one of which I received. A higher res copy of the photo can be seen here
2007
  • December 7 - I presented our paper Exploiting Parallel Treebanks to Improve Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation at TLT'07 in Bergen, Norway. Slides here
  • December 6 - I was awarded a Microsoft Postgraduate Research Scholarship, worth €1610, for work entitled "Exploiting Parallel Treebanks to Improve Data-Driven Machine Translation"
  • October 11 - I'll be co-chairing the NCLT Seminar Series this year with Ventsi. See here for more details.
  • October 8 - Paper accepted to TLT! See publications
  • September 12 - Presented our paper Robust Language Pair-Independent Subtree Alignment at MT Summit XI in Copenhagen, Denmark. Slides here
  • September 5 to 16 - Attended TMI and MT Summit in Skovde and Copenhagen respectively. Photos here
  • August 31 - Submitted paper entitled Exploiting Parallel Treebanks to Improve Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation to TLT with Mary and Andy
  • June 30 - Paper accepted to TMI! See publications
  • May 31 - Paper accepted to MT Summit! See publications
  • May 23 - :-(
  • May 14 - Submitted paper entitled Capturing Translational Divergences with a Statistical Tree-to-Tree aligner to TMI with Ventsi, Mary, and Andy
  • May 9 - Presentation at NCLT Seminar Series entitled Robust Language Pair-Independent Sub-Tree Alignment with Ventsi. Slides here
  • May 1 - Witnessed that nerve wracking semi-final in person
  • April 16 to 20 - Attending First MT Marathon @ University of Edinburgh
  • April 15 - Submitted paper entitled Robust Language Pair-Independent Sub-Tree alignment to MT Summit with Ventsi, Mary, and Andy
  • Mar 25 - I am on the programme committee for the Student Research Workshop at AMTA 2008 in Hawai'i
  • Feb 21 - Went to see Liverpool beat Barcelona 2-1 :D
  • Feb 05 - I am tutoring lab sessions for CA146 - Introduction to Programming (C++). Course notes can here found here
2006