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.
research computational and cognitive linguistics;
models of language structure, use and learning
publications dissertation, selected publications
personal at least a few (tid)bits
Cappadocia, summer 2005

Nancy Chang
nchang [at] icsi.berkeley.edu

International Computer Science Institute
1947 Center St., Suite 600, Rm. 560
Berkeley, CA 94704
Phone: +1 (510) 666-2889
Fax +1 (510) 666-2956