I am an Assistant Professor at the Linguistics Department and the School of Computing at Montclair State University as an assistant professor. My research aims to identify components of natural learning that facilitate human linguistic competency. I create plausible computational models that learn through a plausible incremental process using computational building blocks that clearly map to presumed cognitive abilities. My goal is to improve our understanding of how people learn efficiently, what makes child-directed speech uniquely powerful as input for language learners, and how to develop better teaching streams for speakers with specific learning trajectories, e.g., children with speech delays and second language learners.

I was previously a postdoctoral researcher working with Patrick Shafto in the Computer Science and Psychology departments at Rutgers University. I have been fortunate to work as a postdoctoral researcher with Naomi Feldman in the Linguistics department at the University of Maryland, and as a postdoctoral researcher with Adele Goldberg in the Psychology department at Princeton University.

I am a graduate of the Computational Linguistics group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where I completed my Ph.D. under the supervision of Suzanne Stevenson.  My Ph.D. thesis focused on the development of a Bayesian model to analyze the acquisition of mental state verbs by children.

I’ve completed my M.Sc. thesis at Bar-Ilan University under the supervision of Ido Dagan. My M.Sc. thesis evaluated the contribution of statistical methods of textual entailment for unsupervised text classification.

I have served as a board member and past lead organizer of the Widening NLP (WiNLP) workshop. WiNLP is a workshop dedicated to promoting and supporting NLP researchers who self-identify with underrepresented groups. The workshop highlights their work by co-locating with the yearly ACL conference. Participants have access to mentorship, career advice, and travel grants. Check out the call-for-papers or contact the organizers for more information (or just email me).