Regina Barzilay has been named the Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. The appointment recognizes Barzilay’s leadership in human language technology and her distinguished mentoring and educational contributions.
“Professor Barzilay is internationally renowned in the fields of natural language processing and computational linguistics, and widely respected as a creative thought leader,” wrote Anantha Chandrakasan, chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, in a note announcing her appointment. “In addition to her research, she has made truly outstanding contributions to education.”
Barzilay’s research on natural languages focuses on the development of natural language models and uses these models to solve real-world language processing tasks. Her computational linguistics research examines multilingual learning, interpreting text to solve control problems, and finding document-level structure in text. Barzilay’s work enables automatic document summarization, machine interpretation of natural language instructions, and deciphering archaic languages. As there is more and more text in the world to search and interpret, the number of submissions for this work increases year by year.
Together with Professor Tommi Jaakkola, Barzilay developed the 6.036 (Introduction to Machine Learning) course. The course is a core subject that is taken by over 300 students. Given the importance of substantial data, machine learning has become a core subject for our students. The course prepares students for careers in applied machine learning. Barzilay also recently revised the format of 6.864 (Advanced Natural Language Processing). The content of the course has been modified to include applications of deep neural networks to natural language processing, a topic that is almost exclusively found in scientific articles. The course has been restructured to emphasize project-based learning. This format has helped many students, especially undergraduates, to start their own research in natural language processing. Barzilay was recognized for her contribution to education with the Jamieson Teaching Award in 2016.
Barzilay has also made valuable professional contributions to her field and department. She serves as an Action Editor for the Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She served as Program Co-Chair of the 2011 Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) Conference and is the 2017 Conference Chair of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She also served as Program Co-Chair of the 2015 Rising Stars Workshop for Women in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT, where she solicited applications from leading computer science groups.
Barzilay is the recipient of various awards, including a National Science Foundation Career Award, a TR-35 Award, a Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, and several best paper awards from leading natural language processing conferences.