I’m a data scientist specializing in multilingual human language technologies. I have a background in generative linguistics with academic foundations in syntax, semantics, and psycholinguistics. As a Language Engineer at Amazon Web Services, I work on the data side of AI and ML systems for products like Transcribe, Contact Lens, and Bedrock Data Automation. My role involves collaborating with product managers, applied scientists, and engineers to develop robust data collection and enrichment methodologies that support the development and improvement of AI/ML systems. While I don’t directly create customer-facing systems, my work centers around these key areas:

  1. Task design (operationalizing annotation and evaluation needs for training and assessing AI/ML systems)
  2. Methodology development for the evaluation and analysis of LLM outputs
  3. Implementation of data quality measurement and assurance strategies — a critical aspect of data-centric AI.

I’m the developer and maintainer of Mkdnflow, a plugin for Neovim that enhances the navigation and management of any kind of collection of markdown files within Neovim (notebooks, journals, wikis, pre-rendered websites, etc.).

On the academic side, my interests have included natural language syntax and semantics, the syntax-semantics interface, and psycholinguistics, with a special interest in the syntax of long-distance dependencies. I am invested in the use of controlled experimental methodologies to gain insight into linguistic competence and its interfaces with performance systems, especially when informally collected judgments are unreliable or ambiguous. My dissertation (June 2021) investigates extraction from relative clauses in English in the context of related work on relative clauses in the North Germanic languages of Mainland Scandinavia (Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian), some Romance languages, and Hebrew. A related paper that I co-wrote with Ivy Sichel and Matt Wagers was recently published in a special islands issue of the MDPI publication Languages.

I have sometimes served as a Linguistics lecturer at UC Santa Cruz, where I received my doctorate.