Biography

Hanna Wallach is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, working with Andrew McCallum. Hanna's Ph.D. work, undertaken at the University of Cambridge, introduced new methods for statistically modelling text using structured topic models—models that combine latent topics with information about document structure, ranging from local sentence structure to inter-document relationships. Hanna holds a M.Sc. from the University of Edinburgh, where she specialized in neural computing and learning from data, and was awarded the University of Edinburgh's 2001/2002 prize for Best M.Sc. Student in Cognitive Science. Hanna received her B.A. from the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in 2001. Her undergraduate project, "Visual Representation of Computer-Aided Design Constraints," won the award for the best computer science student in the 2001 U.K. Science Engineering and Technology Awards. In addition to her machine learning research, Hanna works to promote women's involvement in computing. In 2006, she co-founded an annual workshop for women in the field of machine learning, in order to give female faculty, research scientists and graduate students an opportunity to meet, exchange ideas, and learn from each other.

Theses

"Structured Topic Models for Language." Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 2008.

"Efficient Training of Conditional Random Fields." M.Sc. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2002.

"Visual representation of CAD constraints." B.A. thesis, University of Cambridge, 2001.

Publications

David Mimno, Hanna Wallach, Jason Naradowsky, David Smith and Andrew McCallum. "Polylingual Topic Models." To appear in Proceedings of the 2009 EMNLP Conference, Singapore, 2009.

Hanna Wallach, Iain Murray, Ruslan Salakhutdinov and David Mimno. "Evaluation Methods for Topic Models." In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Machine Learning, 2009.

David Mimno and Hanna Wallach. "Computational Papyrology." Presented at at Media in Transition 6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2009.

Hanna Wallach, Iain Murray, Ruslan Salakhutdinov and David Mimno. "Evaluation Methods for Topic Models." Presented at the Learning Workshop (Snowbird), Clearwater, Florida, 2009.

David Mimno, Hanna Wallach, Limin Yao, Jason Naradowsky and Andrew McCallum. "Polylingual Topic Models." Presented at the Learning Workshop (Snowbird), Clearwater, Florida, 2009.

David Mimno, Hanna Wallach and Andrew McCallum. "Gibbs Sampling for Logistic Normal Topic Models with Graph-Based Priors." In Proceedings of the 2008 Workshop on Analyzing Graphs: Theory and Applications (held in conjunction with NIPS), Whistler, Canada, 2008.

Hanna Wallach, Charles Sutton and Andrew McCallum. "Bayesian Modeling of Dependency Trees Using Hierarchical Pitman-Yor Priors." In Proceedings of the Workshop on Prior Knowledge for Text and language (held in conjunction with ICML/UAI/COLT), pp. 15–20. Helsinki, Finland, 2008.

Mark Dredze, Hanna Wallach, Danny Puller, Tova Brooks, Josh Carroll, Joshua Magarick, John Blitzer and Fernando Pereira. "Intelligent Email: Aiding Users with AI." In Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Artificial Intelligence (NECTAR Track), pp. 1524–1527. Chicago, Illinois, U.S., 2008.

Mark Dredze and Hanna Wallach. "User Models for Email Activity Management." In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Ubiquitous User Modeling. Gran Canaria, Spain, 2008.

Mark Dredze, Hanna Wallach, Danny Puller and Fernando Pereira. "Generating Summary Keywords for Emails Using Topics." In Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2008), pp. 199–206. Gran Canaria, Spain, 2008.

David Mimno, Hanna Wallach and Andrew McCallum. "Community-based Link Prediction with Text." In Proceedings of the NIPS Statistical Network Modeling Workshop. Whistler, Canada, 2007.

Hanna Wallach. "Topic Modeling: Beyond Bag-of-Words." In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 977–984. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S., 2006.

Hanna Wallach. "Topic Modeling: Beyond Bag-of-Words." In Proceedings of the 1st Annual North East Student Colloquium on Artificial Intelligence (NESCAI 2006), Ithaca, New York, U.S., 2006.

Hanna Wallach. "Topic Modeling: Beyond Bag-of-Words." In Proceedings of the NIPS Workshop on Bayesian Methods for Natural Language Processing, Whistler, Canada, 2005.

Hanna Wallach. "Efficient Training of Conditional Random Fields." In Proceedings of the 6th Annual Computational Linguistics U.K. Research Colloquium (CLUK 6), Edinburgh, U.K., 2003.

Alan Blackwell and Hanna Wallach. "Diagrammatic Integration of Abstract Operations into Software Work Contexts." In Diagrammatic Representation and Inference, edited by Mary Hegarty, Bernd Meyer and N. Hari Narayanan, pp. 191–205, Springer-Verlag, London, U.K. 2002.

Technical Reports

Hanna Wallach. "Conditional Random Fields: An Introduction." 9 pages. Technical Report MS-CIS-04-21. Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, 2004.

Contact Details

Department of Computer Science
University of Massachusetts Amherst
140 Governors Drive
Amherst, MA 01003

Telephone: 1.413.545.3057