Daniel Bauer

Currently, I am a Computer Science PhD Candidate at Columbia University in the City of New York where I am affiliated with the Natural Language Processing Group and the Center for Computational Learning Systems (CCLS). I work on the text2scene project in which we develop a system to automatically create 3D scenes from natural language descriptions. My PhD advisor is Owen Rambow.

I am currently (2013) interning at USC/ISI for the second summer in a row, working on semantics-based machine translation.

Previously, I have obtained a MSc degree in Language Science and Technology from Saarland University, Germany and a BSc degree in Cognitive Science from the University of Osnabrück, Germany.

Research

My current research is on semantic parsing of natural language into frame-based representations that can be grounded in semantic primitives. One application of this work is text-to-3D-scene-generation. I am interested in the relation between syntactic realization and semantic structure, as well as in the interpretation of semantic structure in context of 3D scenes and linguistic discourse. The aim of my research is to develop joint models that integrate these different levels of representation (syntax, semantics, graphics). More generally, I am interested in computational and lexical semantics, syntactic and semantic analysis in context, the syntax/semantics interface, and grammar formalisms.

My master's thesis was on statistical sentence generation with tree adjoining grammars.

Teaching

Spring 2012: COMS W3101-3 - Programming Languages: Python.
Fall 2011: TA for COMS W4705 - Introduction to Natural Language Processing (taught by Michael Collins).

News

On Mar 11 2013 I passed my PhD Candidacy Exam on Semantic Parsing.

I am now co-founder of WordsEye, a startup company taking text-to-scene generation to the social media market.
We are participating in the IE@Columbia program at the Columbia Business School.

Other things

I am the organizer of the NLP seminar series ( NLP meetings) at Columbia. Subscribe to the mailing list or contact me if you would like to present.

I'm a Graduate Student Advisory Council representative for the CS department.

In my spare time I enjoy cooking, playing my guitar, discovering New York City, hiking, traveling and taking photos.

I enjoy the company of the following other Columbia CS grad students (this is obviously an attempt to increase our Google rank, but I really do enjoy their company):
Arthi Ramachandran, Apoorv Agarwal, Bob Coyne, Vinod Prabhakaran