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

Ph.D. Computer Science, 2012 (expected), Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR.
M.S. Computer Science, 2006. Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR.
B.S. Computer Science and Mathematics, Philosophy minor, 2004. George Fox University, Newberg, OR.
Newport High School, 2000, Newport, OR.
Newport Middle School, 1996, Newport, OR.
Sam Case Elementary, 1993, Newport, OR.
Lincoln Elementary, Corvallis, OR.

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

BUBS Parser (a.k.a. OHSU Parser). Fast, high accuracy syntactic parser written in Java.
Grammar Induction and Parse Tree Transformations for Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK).
Parsing Chart Visualization for Inside/Outside estimation and Chart Constraints.

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