I develop and study statistical machine learning systems with applications in human language, biology, and social science. Currently, I am most excited about using these technologies to help people learn languages and make music.

Pretentious 3rd-Person Bio: Burr Settles used to lead the research group at Duolingo, an award-winning website and mobile app offering free language education for the world. He also runs FAWM.ORG, a global annual songwriting experiment. He is the author of Active Learning — an intermediate text on machine learning algorithms that are adaptive, curious, and exploratory (if you will). His research has been published in NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL-HLT, and CHI, and has been covered by The New York Times, Slate, Forbes, WIRED, and the BBC among others. In past lives, he was a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon and earned a PhD from UW-Madison. Burr currently lives in Pittsburgh, where he gets around by bike and plays guitar, formerly for delicious pastries. ♥

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  Active Learning Book
  B. Settles
  Morgan & Claypool, 2012
  A short intermediate text on active learning, a subfield of machine learning and artificial intelligence. For researchers, graduate students, and engineers working in computer science, statistics, psychology, and related fields.
  publisher's website · Amazon
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  Jump-Starting Item Parameters for Adaptive Language Tests
  A.D. McCarthy, K.P. Yancey, G.T. LaFlair, J. Egbert, M. Liao, and B. Settles
  Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2021
  pdf · Duolingo English Test
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  Machine Learning Driven Language Assessment
  B. Settles, G.T. LaFlair, and M. Hagiwara
  Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2020
  pdf · Duolingo English Test
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  A Sleeping, Recovering Bandit Algorithm for Optimizing Recurring Notifications
  K.P. Yancey and B. Settles
  Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2020
  pdf · data
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  Simultaneous Translation and Paraphrase for Language Education
  S. Mayhew, K. Bicknell, C. Brust, B. McDowell, W. Monroe, and B. Settles
  STAPLE Shared Task @ ACL, 2020
  pdf · code+data · website
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  Second Language Acquisition Modeling
  B. Settles, C. Brust, E. Gustafson, M. Hagiwara and N. Madnani
  SLAM Shared Task @ NAACL-HLT, 2018
  pdf · code+data · website
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  A Trainable Spaced Repetition Model for Language Learning
  B. Settles and B. Meeder
  Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2016
  pdf · code+data · Duolingo
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  Self-directed Learning Favors Local, Rather Than Global, Uncertainty
  D.B. Markant, B. Settles, and T.M. Gureckis
  Cognitive Science, 2016
  pdf · publisher's website

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