Bill MacCartney

papers · talks · downloads · resume · personal

I'm the Director of Proactive Intelligence at Apple, where I lead 120+ scientists and engineers in using machine learning and natural language processing to build predictive models of language and user behavior. In this role, I oversee teams responsible for the QuickType, QuickPath, Shortcuts, Siri Suggestions, and Siri Found In features. Previously, I was a Senior Research Scientist at Google, where I worked on natural language understanding for search and Google Now.

I'm also a Consulting Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford. Since 2010, I've taught CS224U: Natural Language Understanding together with Prof. Christopher Potts. This is a grad-level class, cross-listed between Computer Science and Linguistics, with an enrollment of 275+.

I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University in 2009. I was advised by Prof. Chris Manning, and was a member of the NLP research group and the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. My doctoral research focused on probabilistic approaches to computational semantics and the problem of natural language inference. I published a number of well-regarded academic papers in NLP, and won the Best Paper award at the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics in 2008. I was also co-author of the Stanford typed dependency parser, which has been cited more than 2,400 times.

My Ph.D. dissertation

Natural language inference [pdf] [ppt]
Bill MacCartney
Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, June 2009

Peer-reviewed papers

An extended model of natural logic [pdf] [ppt]
Bill MacCartney and Christopher D. Manning
The Eighth International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS-8), Tilburg, Netherlands, January 2009

A phrase-based alignment model for natural language inference [pdf] [ppt]
Bill MacCartney, Michel Galley, and Christopher D. Manning
The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-08), Honolulu, HI, October 2008

Modeling semantic containment and exclusion in natural language inference [pdf] [ppt]
Bill MacCartney and Christopher D. Manning
The 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling-08), Manchester, UK, August 2008
—received Best Paper Award—

Natural logic for textual inference [pdf] [ppt]
Bill MacCartney and Christopher D. Manning
ACL Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing, Prague, June 2007

Learning Alignments and Leveraging Natural Logic [pdf]
Nathanael Chambers, Daniel Cer, Trond Grenager, David Hall, Chloe Kiddon, Bill MacCartney, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Daniel Ramage, Eric Yeh and Christopher D. Manning
ACL Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing, Prague, June 2007

Aligning semantic graphs for textual inference and machine reading [pdf]
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Trond Grenager, Bill MacCartney, Daniel Cer, Daniel Ramage, Chloé Kiddon, Christopher D. Manning
AAAI Spring Symposium at Stanford, 2007

Learning to recognize features of valid textual entailments [pdf] [ppt]
Bill MacCartney, Trond Grenager, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Daniel Cer, Christopher D. Manning
Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT-NAACL 2006)

Generating Typed Dependency Parses from Phrase Structure Parses [pdf]
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Bill MacCartney, Christopher D. Manning
5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006)

Learning to distinguish valid textual entailments [pdf]
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Bill MacCartney, Trond Grenager, Daniel Cer, Anna Rafferty, and Christopher D. Manning
Second Pascal RTE Challenge Workshop, 2006

Robust Textual Inference using Diverse Knowledge Sources [pdf]
Rajat Raina, Aria Haghighi, Christopher Cox, Jenny Finkel, Jeff Michels, Kristina Toutanova, Bill MacCartney, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Christopher D. Manning, Andrew Y. Ng
Proceedings of the First PASCAL Challenges Workshop, 2005

Solving Logic Puzzles: From Robust Processing to Precise Semantics [pdf]
Iddo Lev, Bill MacCartney, Christopher D. Manning, Roger Levy
Proceedings of the ACL-04 Workshop on Text Meaning and Interpretation, July 2004

Practical Partition-Based Theorem Proving for Large Knowledge Bases [pdf, ps]
Bill MacCartney, Sheila A. McIlraith, Eyal Amir, Tomas Uribe
Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-03), August 2003

The Cycic Friends Network: Getting Cyc agents to reason together [pdf, ps]
James Mayfield, Tim Finin, Rajkumar Narayanaswamy, Chetan Shah, William MacCartney & Keith Goolsbey
Proceedings of the ACM CIKM-95 Intelligent Information Agents Workshop, December 1995

Invited Talks

Natural Logic and Natural Language Inference [pdf]
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 10 April 2015

Understanding Natural Language Understanding [pdf, video]
ACM SIGAI Bay Area Chapter Inaugural Meeting, San Mateo, CA, 16 July 2014

Natural Logic and Natural Language Inference [ppt]
Workshop on Natural Logic, Proof Theory, and Computational Semantics, Stanford, CA, 8 April 2011

Two Aspects of the Problem of Natural Language Inference [ppt, video]
Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, 8 October 2008

Two Related Approaches to the Problem of Textual Inference [ppt, ppt]
Columbia University, New York, 6 March 2008

Containment, Exclusion, and Implicativity: A Model of Natural Logic for Textual Inference [ppt]
Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany, 14 February 2008

Practical Partition-Based Theorem Proving for Large Knowledge Bases [ppt]
University of California at San Diego, 3 February 2003

Undergraduate Thesis

On the Use of Pseudo-Empirical Induction in Mathematics [html]
William MacCartney
Senior Thesis, Princeton University, Department of Philosophy, 30 April 1990

Professional Service

I've served on the program committee or as a reviewer for several NLP conferences:

Reviewer, NAACL-HLT 2007
Reviewer, EMNLP 2008
Reviewer, NAACL-HLT 2009
Program Committee, TextInfer 2009
Program Committee, NASSLLI 2010 Workshop on Inference from Text
Program Committee, EMNLP 2010
Program Committee, IWCS 2011
Program Committee, TextInfer 2011
Program Committee, EMNLP 2011
Program Committee, COLING 2012

Contact info

Email: my domain is cs.stanford.edu and my username is wcmac

Phone: 415-742-1185

Profiles: LinkedIn, Scholar, GitHub

We never perform a computation ourselves, we just hitch a ride on the great Computation that is going on already. —Tommaso Toffoli

Yes, we have a soul. But it's made of lots of tiny robots. —Giulio Giorelli

Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind. —Marston Bates

If the police police police police, who polices the police police? Police police police police police police. —Hans-Martin Gärtner