About Me

I am a second-year Ph.D. student at the Center for Language and Speech Processing supervised by Benjamin Van Durme, where I am working on broad questions in computational semantics. I am especially interested in working in cross-lingual settings and with low-resource languages. Before starting my Ph.D., I received my B.A.&Sc. with First Class Honours in Cognitive Science from McGill University, focusing in computer science and linguistics. While at McGill, I worked as a research assistant at the Montreal Language Modeling Lab (MLML), now MCQLL. I wrote my honours thesis (supervised by Timothy O'Donnell) on a variational inference algorithm for a model of language acquisition.

News

  • 09-04-2019 My first accepted paper (EMNLP 2019) as a graduate student is now available on arXiv
  • 04-10-2019 I'm incredibly honored to have been awarded an NSF GRFP fellowship!
  • 08-18-2018 I'm excited to be starting as a PhD student at CLSP, supervised by Benjamin Van Durme!

Publications

  • Stengel-Eskin, Elias, Tzu-Ray Su, Matt Post, and Benjamin Van Durme. "A Discriminative Neural Model for Cross-Lingual Word Alignment." arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.00444 (2019).
  • McAuliffe, Michael, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Michaela Socolof, and Morgan Sonderegger. "Polyglot and Speech Corpus Tools: A System for Representing, Integrating, and Querying Speech Corpora." In INTERSPEECH, pp. 3887-3891. 2017.

    • Recent Work

    Discriminative Alignment

    Word alignments are useful for a number of downstream tasks, but NMT has largely forgotten about them. We reintroduce old notions of supervised alignment and present a neural model for aligning words between a sentence and its translation. We apply our aligner to dataset projection for NER.

    Honours Thesis

    I describe a variational inference scheme and novel phonological system for the Unsupervised Lexicon Discovery model presented by Lee et al. (2015)

    Montreal AI Symposium poster

    A poster describing the work laid out in my thesis, presented at the Montreal AI Symposium (2017) with Emily Kellison-Linn.

    ARIA research poster

    A poster I was invited to present at the McGill Arts Undergraduate Research Internship Research Event (2017) on my experience as an ARIA (Arts Research Internship Award) recipient.