Current Life

I work in the Spoken Language Systems group of the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International, a research, development, and consulting organization based in Menlo Park, CA. I'm working on a computer dialog system called Gemini, adding robustness so it can deal with out-of-grammar utterances.

Previous Life

I grew up in Amherst, MA, and graduated from Amherst Regional High School in 1994. My older brother, Dan, is just one of many other fascinating alumni. I attended Brown University in Providence, RI, and graduated in May '98 with an Sc.B. in mathematics- computer science and a strong interest in linguistics. You can take a look at my old home page there, at least until my account disappears.

Projects and Papers

• My lego robots, Pico and ChiaPet. I made them in Fall '96 for my Building Intelligent Robots class.
• A paper on quantum cryptography, written as part a group independent study on cryptography.
• An introduction to knots and surfaces. This was my final project for Combinatorial Topology, Fall '96.
• An investigation into the intersection of curves. Another project from topology, parts of which I presented at the Hudson River Undergraduate Math Conference.
• A model of the CIT. My final project for Contemporary Architecture, it now resides on the 4th floor of the real CIT.
• "Edge-Based Best-First Chart Parsing." (PostScript format). With Eugene Charniak and Mark Johnson. Presented at the sixth Workshop on Very Large Corpora (following COLING-ACL '98).
• My senior thesis, by the same name (PostScript format). It describes the same research as the above paper, but with more background information. Aimed at the general CS audience rather than statistical natural language researchers.
• A paper about Optical Character Recognition (PostScript format). With Sam Hazlehurst and Andy Miller. It was the final project for our Machine Learning class, and we could have used a little more time...

Summer Log

I spent the summer of 1997 at Brown doing research in the computer science department, dealing with the trials and tribulations of my new apartment, and hanging out with my friends. If you're interested, you can take a peek at the blow-by-blow of my summer.

Contact Information

If you want to get in touch with me, here's how:

Sharon Goldwater

SRI International

333 Ravenswood Ave.

Menlo Park, CA

650-859-4918

goldwater@ai.sri.com