I completed a doctoral dissertation in Computational Linguistics,
a research field at the intersection of language and machine learning,
at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. My focus has been,
primarily, on unsupervised parsing and grammar induction, advised
by Prof. Dan Jurafsky of the Natural Language Processing Group
and supported by a Fannie & John Hertz Foundation Fellowship.

In my third year of the Ph.D., I TA-ed Google's Pandu Nayak's
and (then-)Yahoo!'s Prabhakar Raghavan's graduate course
on Information Retrieval and Web Search (CS.276 / Ling.286).
In the second year, I TA-ed Prof. Manning's graduate course
on Natural Language Processing (CS.224N / Ling.284).

My Erdős number is 2 and my Erdős-Bacon number is at most 6 —
consequences of a collaboration with Danny Kleitman (whose numbers
are 1 and 3), while an undergraduate at MIT, and a bit part in the movie
«Любочка» (credits), as a kindergartner in Odessa (the former USSR).
At Stanford, a friend and I contributed a novel proof to Don Knuth's
Volume IV of The Art of Computer Programming (PF1B, Page 110).

Silly as it is, I now hold more graduate than undergraduate degrees:

	Ph.D.,	Computer Science	January 2014
	M.S.,	Computer Science	January 2012
	M.S.,	Statistics	January 2009	Stanford
	M.Eng.,	Electrical Engineering and Computer Science	June 2000	MIT
	S.B.,	Computer Science and Engineering	June 2000
	S.B.,	Economics	June 2000
	S.B.,	Mathematics (with a minor in Psychology)	June 1999

Scholarly Publications & Patents

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky. 2013.
  Grammar Induction and Parsing with Dependency-and-Boundary Models. [pdf, bib; slides]
  Ph.D. Thesis, Stanford University (CS: Natural Language Processing).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, and Daniel Jurafsky. 2013.
  Breaking Out of Local Optima with Count Transforms and Model Recombination: A Study in Grammar Induction. [pdf, bib; official, slides]
  In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2013; best paper award).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, and Daniel Jurafsky. 2012.
  Bootstrapping Dependency Grammar Inducers from Incomplete Sentence Fragments via Austere Models. [pdf, bib; official, slides]
  In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Grammatical Inference (ICGI 2012).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, and Daniel Jurafsky. 2012.
  Three Dependency-and-Boundary Models for Grammar Induction. [pdf, bib; official, poster]
  In Proceedings of the 2012 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CoNLL 2012).

• Wanxiang Che, Valentin I. Spitkovsky, and Ting Liu. 2012.
  A Comparison of Chinese Parsers for Stanford Dependencies. [pdf, bib; official, slides]
  In Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2012).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, and Daniel Jurafsky. 2012.
  Capitalization Cues Improve Dependency Grammar Induction. [pdf, bib; official, slides]
  In NAACL HLT 2012 Workshop on Inducing Linguistic Structure (WILS 2012).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky and Angel X. Chang. 2012.
  A Cross-Lingual Dictionary for English Wikipedia Concepts. [pdf, bib; official, wikiPapers, slides, post, data]
  In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012).

• Mihai Surdeanu, Sonal Gupta, John Bauer, David McClosky, Angel X. Chang, Valentin I. Spitkovsky, and Christopher D. Manning. 2011.
  Stanford's Distantly-Supervised Slot-Filling System. [pdf, bib; official, data]
  In Proceedings of the Fourth Text Analysis Conference (TAC 2011).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky and Angel X. Chang. 2011.
  Strong Baselines for Cross-Lingual Entity Linking. [pdf, bib; official]
  In Proceedings of the Fourth Text Analysis Conference (TAC 2011).

• Angel X. Chang, Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Eneko Agirre, and Christopher D. Manning. 2011.
  Stanford-UBC Entity Linking at TAC-KBP, Again. [pdf, bib; official]
  In Proceedings of the Fourth Text Analysis Conference (TAC 2011).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, Angel X. Chang, and Daniel Jurafsky. 2011.
  Unsupervised Dependency Parsing without Gold Part-of-Speech Tags. [pdf, bib; official, poster, data]
  In Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2011).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, and Daniel Jurafsky. 2011.
  Lateen EM: Unsupervised Training with Multiple Objectives, Applied to Dependency Grammar Induction. [pdf, bib; official, poster]
  In Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2011).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, and Daniel Jurafsky. 2011.
  Punctuation: Making a Point in Unsupervised Dependency Parsing. [pdf, bib; official, slides]
  In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2011).

• Mihai Surdeanu, David McClosky, Julie Tibshirani, John Bauer, Angel X. Chang, Valentin I. Spitkovsky, and Christopher D. Manning. 2010.
  A Simple Distant Supervision Approach for the TAC-KBP Slot Filling Task. [pdf, bib; official, slides, data]
  In Proceedings of the Third Text Analysis Conference (TAC 2010).

• Angel X. Chang, Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Eric Yeh, Eneko Agirre, and Christopher D. Manning. 2010.
  Stanford-UBC Entity Linking at TAC-KBP. [pdf, bib; official, poster]
  In Proceedings of the Third Text Analysis Conference (TAC 2010).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, Daniel Jurafsky, and Christopher D. Manning. 2010.
  Viterbi Training Improves Unsupervised Dependency Parsing. [pdf, bib; official, slides]
  In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2010).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Daniel Jurafsky, and Hiyan Alshawi. 2010.
  Profiting from Mark-Up: Hyper-Text Annotations for Guided Parsing. [pdf, bib; official, slides, data]
  In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2010).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, and Daniel Jurafsky. 2010.
  From Baby Steps to Leapfrog: How “Less is More” in Unsupervised Dependency Parsing. [pdf, bib; official, slides, data]
  In Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 11th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL HLT 2010).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, and Daniel Jurafsky. 2009.
  Baby Steps: How “Less is More” in Unsupervised Dependency Parsing. [pdf, bib; official, poster, data]
  In NIPS 2009 Workshop on Grammar Induction, Representation of Language and Language Learning (GRLL 2009).

• Eneko Agirre, Angel X. Chang, Daniel S. Jurafsky, Christopher D. Manning, Valentin I. Spitkovsky, and Eric Yeh. 2009.
  Stanford-UBC at TAC-KBP. [pdf, bib; official, slides]
  In Proceedings of the Second Text Analysis Conference (TAC 2009).

  ---

• Valentin Spitkovsky.
  Displaying Electronic Mail in a Rating-Based Order.
  Filed on June 30, 2005; application serial no. 11/173,803 (GP-508-00-US).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Sumit Agarwal, Gokul Rajaram, and Brian Axe.
  Keywordless Advertising.
  To be filed (GP-470-00-US).

• Ross Koningstein, Steve Lawrence, and Valentin Spitkovsky.
  Associating Features with Entities, Such as Categories or Web Page Documents, and/or Weighing Such Features.
  Filed on December 30, 2004; application serial no. 11/026,497 (GP-268-00-US).

• Valentin Spitkovsky.
  Determining Online Ad Targeting Information, Such as Keyword-Targeting Suggestions.
  Filed on December 20, 2004; application serial no. 11/017,424 (GP-390-00-US).

• Valentin Spitkovsky.
  Mixing Items, Such as Ad Targeting Keyword Suggestions, from Heterogeneous Sources.
  Filed on October 1, 2004; application serial no. 10/957,337 (GP-325-00-US).

• Ross Koningstein, Valentin Spitkovsky, Georges Harik, and Noam Shazeer.
  Suggesting and/or Providing Targeting Criteria for Advertisements.
  Filed on December 31st, 2003; application serial no. 10/750,451 (GP-099-00-US).

• Ross Koningstein, Valentin Spitkovsky, Georges Harik, and Noam Shazeer.
  Using Concepts for Ad Targeting.
  Filed on November 24th, 2003; application serial no. 10/721,010 (GP-083-00-US).

  ---

• Rahul Simha, Weidong Cai and Valentin Spitkovsky. 2001.
  Simulated N-Body: New Particle Physics-Based Heuristics for a Euclidean Location-Allocation Problem. [ps.gz; official]
  Journal of Heuristics, 7 (1).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky. 2000.
  A Fast Genomic Dictionary. [ps.gz]
  M.Eng. Thesis, MIT (EECS: Computational Biology).

• Lior Pachter, Serafim Batzoglou, Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Eric Banks, Eric S. Lander, Daniel J. Kleitman, and Bonnie Berger. 1999.
  A Dictionary-Based Approach for Gene Annotation. [ps.gz; official]
  Journal of Computational Biology, 6 (3/4).

• Lior Pachter, Serafim Batzoglou, Valentin I. Spitkovsky, William S. Beebee, Jr., Eric S. Lander, Bonnie Berger, and Daniel J. Kleitman. 1999.
  A Dictionary Based Approach for Gene Annotation. [ps.gz]
  In Proceedings of the Third Annual International Conference on Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB'99).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky. 1993.
  CAPSULE. [official]
  Jefferson Laboratory Technical Notes (CEBAF-TN-93-066).
  

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky. 1993.
  CAVGLE. [official]
  Jefferson Laboratory Technical Notes (CEBAF-TN-93-065).
  

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky. 1993.
  CAVTEK. [official]
  Jefferson Laboratory Technical Notes (CEBAF-TN-93-064).

Professional Service

• Reviewer for the Computational Linguistics (CL), Language Resources and Evaluation (JLRE) and Machine Learning (MLJ) journals.

• Reviewer, in the Syntax, Grammar Induction, Syntactic and Semantic Parsing track, for the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2014).

• Reviewer for the Eighteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2014).

• Reviewer, in the Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing track, for the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2014).

• Reviewer, in the Machine Learning track, for the Fourteenth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2014).

• Reviewer, in the Syntax and Parsing and NLP-related Machine Learning Theory, Methods and Algorithms tracks, for the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2013).

• Reviewer, in the Multilinguality track, for the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2013).

• Reviewer, in the NLP-enabled Technology track, for the 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2013).

• Reviewer, in the Parsing track, for the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2012).

• Reviewer for the Eighth Asia Information Retrieval Societies Conference (AIRS 2012).

• Reviewer, in the Syntax and Parsing track, for the 2012 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CoNLL 2012).

• Reviewer for the Workshop on Inducing Linguistic Structure (WILS) at NAACL HLT 2012.

• Reviewer for the Joint Workshop on Unsupervised and Semi-Supervised Learning in Natural Language Processing (ROBUS-UNSUP) at EACL 2012.

• Reviewer, in the Syntax track, for the 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP 2011).

• Reviewer for the Workshop on Robust Unsupervised and Semisupervised Methods in Natural Language Processing (ROBUS 2011) at RANLP 2011.

• Reviewer, in the Unsupervised Learning track, for the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-11).

• Panelist and reviewer for the First Workshop on Unsupervised Learning in NLP (UNSUP-2011) at EMNLP 2011.

• Reviewer, in the Syntax and Parsing track, for the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2011).

• Reviewer for the Fifteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2011).

• Reviewer, in the Syntax and Parsing track, for the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (ACL HLT 2011).

• Reviewer, in the Statistical and Machine Learning Methods track, for the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2010).