Nathan Bodenstab

last_name@gmail.com



It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
~ James Thurber


I'm a PhD student in the Natural Language Processing group of the Center for Spoken Language Understanding at Oregon Health & Science University (formerly OGI). My advisor is Brian Roark.

Research Interests

I work on problems in Natural Language Processing and Speech Recognition, in particular efficient decoding for syntactic parsing, grammar induction, domain adaptation, and language modeling. When I explain it to my grandma, I say it's the artificial intelligence behind Hal 9000 and the Jeopardy! player Watson.

Education

Employment

  • Sr. Research Scientist, 2007-2009; part-time 2009-present. Nuance, Boston, MA.
  • Research Internship, Summer 2010, Google, Zurich, Switzerland.
  • Research Internship, Summer 2006, Nuance, Boston, MA.
  • Systems Administrator, 2000-2004, City of Newberg, Newberg, OR.
  • Lifeguard, 1996-2000, City of Newport, Newport, OR.
  • Yard maintenance and dish cleaning specialist, 1988-2000, My Parent's House, Newport, OR.

Publications

  • Finite-state chart constraints for reduced complexity context-free parsing pipelines
    Brian Roark, Nathan Bodenstab, and Kristy Hollingshead — Computational Linguistics (in submission)
    [pdf] [bibtex]
     
  • Beam-Width Prediction for Efficient Context-Free Parsing
    Nathan Bodenstab, Aaron Dunlop, Keith Hall, and Brian Roark — ACL/HLT 2011.
    [pdf] [bibtex] [slides]
     
  • Unary Constraints for Efficient Context-Free Parsing
    Nathan Bodenstab, Kristy Hollingshead, and Brian Roark — ACL/HLT 2011.
    [pdf] [bibtex] [poster]
     
  • Efficient Matrix-Encoded Grammars and Low Latency Parallelization Strategies for CYK
    Aaron Dunlop, Nathan Bodenstab and Brian Roark — IWPT 2011.
    [pdf] [bibtex]
     
  • Exponential Decay Pruning for Bottom-Up Beam-Search Parsing
    Nathan Bodenstab, Aaron Dunlop, Keith Hall, and Brian Roark — NW-NLP Workshop 2010.
    [pdf] [bibtex] [slides] [talk]
     
  • Reducing the grammar constant: an analysis of CYK parsing efficiency
    Aaron Dunlop, Nathan Bodenstab, and Brian Roark — Tech report, OHSU, 2010.
    [pdf] [bibtex]
     
  • Multi-Pass Pronunciation Adaptation
    Nathan Bodenstab and Mark Fanty — ICASSP 2007.
    [pdf] [bibtex] [poster]
     
  • Coarse-to-Fine Efficient Viterbi Parsing
    Nathan Bodenstab — Research Proficiency Exam, OHSU, 2006.
    [pdf] [bibtex] [slides]  

Presentations and Software

  • Graph-Based Semi-Supervised Learning for Dependency Parsing [pdf]. Google Internship with Keith Hall, 2010.
  • Efficient Implementation of the CKY Algorithm [pdf]. CS606 Computational Linguistics presentation, 2009.
  • Input with Ambiguous Keyboards [ppt]. Augmentative and Alternative Communication presentation, 2009.
  • Machine learning and NLP research at OGI. Invited talk, George Fox University, 2006

Activities & Awards

  • ACL/HLT organizing committee, 2011.
  • Reviewed for: EMNLP 2011, IJCNLP 2011, EACL 2012.
  • Four U.S. patents pending, submitted 2010 and 2011.
  • Nuance Invention Award, 2010.
  • App Store Hall of Fame, Dragon Dictation App (member of R&D team), 2010.
  • Google Pizza Ambassador, 2005-2007.
  • ACM Programming Contest, 2002-2004.
  • Computer Science Student of the Year, George Fox University, 2004.
  • Presidential Scholar, George Fox University, 2000-2004.
  • NHS Varsity Soccer & Golf, 1998-2000.
  • NHS Student Council, 1997-1999. Subjugated under the leadership of Barry Clock and Brent Barton.
  • President NHS Mountain Bike Club, 1999. I think I was voted in as a joke because my bike was from Wal-Mart.
  • CPR for the professional rescuer, 1996-2000. Warning: my rescuing skills peaked in 1999.
  • Phineas F. Bresee Award, 1996.
  • YMCA Soccer Referee Certificate of Completion, 1996.
  • Presidential Physical Fitness Award, 1993 (age 11). I still love the shuttle run.
  • Hunter's Safety Certificate of Completion, 1992. Never ended up hunting, but at least I know how to do it safely.

Personal

I also enjoy some non-computer things like ...

  • Traveling the world by plane and car
  • Camping and hiking in Oregon
  • Playing soccer, ultimate frisbee, and disc golf
  • 8-bit Nintendo and reliving other nostalgic memories
  • Photography (still learning)
  • The interaction between science, religion, and politics in the US
  • All-you-can-eat buffets
  • Being married and hanging out with my crazy family