CSE Assistant Professor Ndapa Nakashole joined the UC San Diego faculty in January, and she will start teaching in the spring quarter with a research-oriented graduate course on Advanced Statistical Natural Language Processing (CSE 291). The course website is now online. "A background in natural language processing is not required," said Nakashole, "but some machine learning experience and programming experience is highly recommended."
Not surprisingly, Nakashole's research interests are in natural language processing and machine learning. She uses machine learning to build computer systems that intelligently process and understand human language. Natural language processing, in particular, aims to develop algorithms that enable computers to understand and generate human language. Nakashole's focus is on developing machine-learning methods that learn language from large collections of data. Among the specific problems she studies: knowledge acquisition, entity recognition and linking, question answering, and more recently, machine translation for low-resource languages.
Namibia-born Nakashole recently joined the CSE faculty from a postdoctoral fellowship in the Machine Learning department at Carnegie Mellon University. A past researcher in the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, she earned her Ph.D. from Germany's Saarland University, after doing her M.S. and B.S. degrees at the University of Cape Town (South Africa).
Ndapa Nakashole Home Page
CSE 291 Statistical Natural Language Processing Course Website