Nancy Chang
This site is my former academic home, maintained only
intermittently. Please regard markers of tense, aspect and modality
as potentially suspect.
I am a research scientist, erstwhile academic and current Google
engineer in the Machine Intelligence group. My longstanding interests
center on models of language structure, use, and learning that satisfy
the constraints of cognition, language and computation. Related roles
include: bridge-builder between academia and industry; translator
across disciplines; and problem case for traditional categories.
For the (professional) record:
- I earned my doctorate
in Computer Science
at UC Berkeley in 2008, while a
member of the Neural
Theory of Language project at
the International Computer Science
Institute.
- I then spent several years in Europe, primarily in Paris: as a
research associate at Sony Computer
Science Laboratory, bringing together cognitive and evolutionary
approaches to grounding language in action and perception; a research
associate at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3), where
I dove deep into development and data, studying the emegence of verbal
constructions and event markers in French and English; and a visiting
lecturer at Gothenburg University, Sweden, where I taught a short
course on cognitive and computational models of language acquistion
and use.
- I returned to the Bay Area and joined Google in October 2012,
initially to work on (multilingual) conversational search. I am now
part of the Machine Intelligence effort, working on areas close to
my research roots, broadly encompassing what I'm calling knowledge
for language.
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