Students and postdocs

Krugman has never had many graduate students. He is unsure why this is so. Is it that his style of thinking, intuitive rather than methodological, is too difficult to imitate? he wonders. Is he too distracted? Too busy? Too short? — Larissa MacFarquhar, New Yorker profile

PhD students and postdocs (and 1st position afterwards).

During their time as students at Cornell, my students gave invited talks or interviews at Bar-Ilan, CMU, CUNY, EPFL, Facebook, Google, the Max Planck institute, Microsoft Research, MIT, MIT Lincoln Labs, Northeastern, Pitt, Rice, Stanford, SUNY Stonybrook, the Technion, UC Boulder, UMass Amherst, University of Pennsylvania, University of Wisconsin, and Yahoo!.

• Khonzoda Umarova. Recipient of a Siegel PiTech PhD Impact Fellowship
  

 

• Regina Barzilay, postdoc 2002-2003 → assistant professor, MIT
  Recipient: Just about every award eligible for
• Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Ph.D. 2012 → tenure-track position, the Max Planck Institute SWS (deferred for a one-year postdoc at Stanford)
  Best Paper Award at WWW 2013, Best Paper Award at the IJCAI 2016 workshop on NLP meets Journalism, Best Paper Award at CSCW 2017, etc.
  Thesis: A computational approach to linguistic coordination
  
• Jack Hessel, Ph.D. 2020 → Allen Institute for AI as a Young Investigator
  Best paper award, ACL 2023.
  Thesis: Learning from multimodal web data
• Rie Johnson (formerly Rie Kubota Ando) Ph.D. 2001 → IBM Watson
  Best Paper Award, CoNLL 2006
  Thesis: The Document Representation Problem: An Analysis of LSI and Iterative Residual Rescaling
• Oren Kurland, Ph.D. 2006 → tenure-track Lecturer at the Technion [Google Scholar profile]
  Thesis: Inter-document similarities, language models, and ad hoc information retrieval
  
• Bo Pang [pronunciation], Ph.D. 2006 → Yahoo! Research
  Featured scientist at Yahoo! Research; 2018 Test-of-Time Paper on Computational Linguistics, 2002-2012
  Thesis: Automatic analysis of document sentiment.
• Tianze Shi, Ph.D. 2021 → Google
  Bloomberg Data Science Fellowship, 2018-2019; top score in the 2021 IWPT shared task; best/outstanding reviewer award, EMNLP 2018, EMNLP 2019, ACL 2021
  Thesis: Enhanced representations and efficient analysis of syntactic dependencies within and beyond tree structures
• Ana Smith, Ph.D. 2023 → MIT Lincoln Labs
  Colman Fellowship; Fulbright Scholar
  Thesis: Leveraging context documents for social natural language processing
• Chenhao Tan, Ph.D. 2016 → assistant professor, University of Colorado-Boulder deferred for postdoc at UW with Noah Smith
  Sloan Fellowship, 2023
  Thesis (the 7th longest title in the department at the time): Computational approaches to understanding human behavior from online social interactions: Language and communities

Undergraduate co-authors

• Mohit Bansal, summer intern 2007 → Berkeley → faculty at TTIC and UNC: Bansal, Cardie & Lee COLING 2008 poster, The power of negative thinking: Exploiting label disagreement in the min-cut classification framework [paper homepage]
• Justin Cheng, B.S. 2012 → Stanford → Meta, Discord; Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Cheng, Kleinberg & Lee ACL 2012, You had me at hello: How phrasing affects memorability. [paper homepage]
• Eunsol Choi, B.A. 2012 → UWashington → faculty at UT-Austin, NYU; Choi, Tan, Lee, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil & Spindel ACL Workshop on Extra-Propositional Aspects of Meaning in Computational Linguistics, 2012, Hedge detection as a lens on framing in the GMO debates: A position paper. [paper homepage]
• Rick Ducott, B.S. 2010 → Palantir: Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lee, & Ducott NAACL 2009, Without a ‘doubt’? Unsupervised discovery of downward-entailing operators [paper homepage]
• Dave (Sang Min) Jung, A.B. 2023, MS 2025 → Google: Nguyen, Jung, Lee, Hull, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil EMNLP Findings 2024. Taking a turn for the better: Conversation redirection throughout the course of mental-health therapy.
• Laerdon Kim: Umarova, Lee & Kim EMNLP 2025, Current semantic-change quantification methods struggle with discovery in the wild.
• Vivian Nguyen, A.B. 2023, MS 2025 → Cornell: Nguyen, Jung, Lee, Hull, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil EMNLP Findings 2024. Taking a turn for the better: Conversation redirection throughout the course of mental-health therapy.
• Matt Thomas, B.S. 2006 → Google: Thomas, Pang & Lee EMNLP 2006, Get out the vote: Determining support or opposition from Congressional floor-debate transcripts. [paper homepage]
• Mark Yatskar, B.S. 2010 → UWashington → faculty at UPenn : Yatskar, Pang, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, & Lee NAACL 2010 short paper, For the sake of simplicity: Unsupervised extraction of lexical simplifications from Wikipedia. [paper homepage]
• Karen Zhou, B.S. 2021 → UChicago. Zhou, Smith, & Lee, 2021 Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media, Assessing cognitive linguistic influences in the assignment of blame