ALVIN GRISSOM II
Associate Professor of Computer Science, Haverford College
agrissom@haverford.edu
DEGREES
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Ph.D., Computer Science 2017 University of Colorado Boulder Boulder, Colorado, USA Thesis: Incremental Prediction and Decision-making for Simultaneous Machine Translation Advisor: Jordan Boyd-Graber M.S., Computer Science 2009 Emory University Atlanta, Georgia, USA Thesis: Sentiment in Japanese: A Corpus-based Approach with Sociolinguistic Implications Advisor: Eugene Agichtein B.A., Computer Science, Mathematics Minor 2006 |
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Hendrix College |
Conway, Arkansas, USA |
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Certificate, Asian Studies |
2004 |
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Kansai Gaidai University ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS |
Hirakata City, Japan |
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Haverford College |
July 2020-Present |
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Associate Professor of Computer Science (Tenured), 2024-Present |
Haverford, PA, USA |
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Assistant Professor of Computer Science, 2020-2023 Visiting Scholar, University of Tokyo, 8/2023-7/2024 Ursinus College |
August 2017 - May 2020 |
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Assistant Professor of Computer Science PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS |
Collegeville, PA, USA |
Haverford students marked with *.
Other undergraduate students marked with **.
Rapidly Piloting Real-time Linguistic Assistance for Simultaneous Interpreters with Un-
trained Bilingual Surrogates 2024
LREC-COLING Turin, Italy
Alvin Grissom II, Jo Shoemaker, Benjamin Goldman*, Ruikang Shi*, Craig Stewart, C. Anton Rytting, Leah Findlater and Jordan Boyd-Graber
Rare but Severe Errors Induced by Minimal Deletion: An Empirical Study on Chinese and English 2022
COLING (31% acceptance rate) Gyeongju, South Korea
Ruikang Shi*, Alvin Grissom II, and Duc Minh Trinh*
An Attentive Recurrent Model for Incremental Prediction of Sentence-final Verbs 2020 Findings of EMNLP
Wenyan Li, Alvin Grissom II, and Jordan Boyd-Graber
Investigating Sports Commentator Bias within a Large Corpus of American Football
Broadcasts 2019
EMNLP (20.5% acceptance rate) Hong Kong
Jack Merullo**, Luke Yeh**, Abram Handler, Alvin Grissom II, Brendan O’Connor, and Mohit Iyyer
Gower as Data: Exploring the Application of Machine Learning to Gower’s Middle English
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Accessus 5(2), 8 Kara L. McShane and Alvin Grissom II |
2019 |
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2018 |
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EMNLP (25% acceptance rate) |
Brussels |
Shi Feng, Eric Wallace**, Alvin Grissom II, Mohit Iyyer, Pedro Rodriguez, and Jordan Boyd-Graber
Substring Frequency Features for Segmentation of Japanese Katakana Words with Unla-
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2017 |
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IJCNLP (31% accepted) Yoshinari Fujinuma and Alvin Grissom II |
Taipei |
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Incremental Prediction of Sentence-final Verbs: Humans versus Machines |
2016 |
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CoNLL (20% acceptance rate) Alvin Grissom II, Naho Orita, and Jordan Boyd-Graber |
Berlin |
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Syntax-based Reordering for Simultaneous Machine Translation |
2015 |
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EMNLP (24% acceptance rate) |
Lisbon |
He He, Alvin Grissom II, Jordan Boyd-Graber, and Hal Daum´e III
Don’t Until the Final Verb Wait: Reinforcement Learning for Simultaneous Machine
Translation 2014
EMNLP (30% acceptance rate) Doha
Alvin Grissom II, He He, Jordan Boyd-Graber, John Morgan, and Hal Daum´e III
Annotating Factive Verbs 2012
LREC Istanbul
Alvin Grissom II and Yusuke Miyao
WORKSHOPS WITH STUDENT WORK
Denoising word embeddings for post-processing gender bias mitigation 2023 Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning (MASC-SLL) Washington, DC
Catherine Lin* (Bryn Mawr, presenter) and Alvin Grissom II
Assessing the Ability of Neural Machine Translation Models to Perform Syntactic Rewriting 2019
Workshop on Widening NLP (WiNLP@ACL) Florence, Italy
Jahkel Robin**, Alvin Grissom II, and Matthew Roselli**
Assessing the Ability of Neural Machine Translation Models to Perform Syntactic Rewriting 2017
Black in AI@NeurIPS Long Beach, CA, USA
Jahkel Robin** (presenter) and Alvin Grissom II
BOOK CHAPTERS
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Bucholtz |
Edited by Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary |
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Oxford University Press |
2024 |
Power Shift: Towards Inclusive Natural Language Processing, Emily M. Bender and Alvin Grissom II
GRANTS
$296,325 National Science Foundation EAGER: DCL: SaTC: Enabling Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Evaluating Bias In The Creation and Perception of GAN-Generated Faces (2022-2024), PI with Ryan Lei
Mozilla Responsible Computing Grant (2021) (with others)
$5500 Pennsylvania Consortium for the Liberal Arts (PCLA) Opportunity Grant (2017)
$150 Amazon EC2 Credit Course Grant (2017)
$600 Google Cloud Credit Course Grant (2017, 2018, 2019)
$1000 Ursinus Small Research Grant (2017, 2018, 2019)
NVIDIA GPU Seed Grant (2017, 1 Titan XP GPU)
TEACHING
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Haverford College |
July 2020-Present |
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Assistant (2020-2024)/Associate Professor of Computer Science CMSC H260 Foundations of Data Science (F-22) CMSC 360 Machine Learning (S-22, S-23) CMSC/LING 325 Computational Linguistics (F-20, F-21) Independent Study: Machine Translation (S-23) |
Haverford, PA, USA |
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Ursinus College |
August 2017 - May 2020 |
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Assistant Professor of Computer Science (Tenure-track) |
Collegeville, PA, USA |
CS-173 Introduction to Computer Science (F-17)
CS-477 Artificial Intelligence (F-17, F-19)
CS-174 Object-Oriented Programming (S-18, S-19, S-20)
CS-474 Human-Computer Interaction (S-18, S-20)
CS-471 CS Seminar: Deep Computer Vision and Language (F-18)
CS-373 Theory of Computation (F-18)
CS-374 Principles of Programming Languages (S-19)
CS 371W Data Structures and Algorithms (S-19, S-20)
Independent Research (F-18, S-18, F-19, S-19)
Independent Study: Computational Linguistics (S-18, S-19, S-20)
University of Colorado August 2016 - December 2016
Instructor of Record, Special Topics: Machine Learning Boulder, CO, USA
Primary instructor for machine learning course for undergraduates, requiring adaptation of fast-paced graduate course.
University of Colorado August 2014 - December 2014
Teaching Assistant, Computer Science I Boulder, CO, USA
Responsible for four recitations per week, or approximately 100 students. Graded held office hours, and tutored students, and planned curricula.
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Duke University Talent Identification Program |
June 2010 - July 2010 |
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Instructor, Web Application Development |
San Antonio, TX, USA |
Created and taught summer course for middle and high school students to learn computer programming and web development.
Emory University September 2008 - May 2009
Teaching Assistant, Computer Science I Atlanta, GA, USA
Held office hours and graded assignments introductory computer science course.
Duke University Talent Identification Program June 2008 - July 2008
Instructor, Computer Programming College Station, TX, USA
Designed and taught two summer sessions for high school students to learn computer science concepts and programming. Was asked to return.
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Hendrix College |
August 2003 - May 2006 |
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Tutor, Math Help Center |
Conway, AR, USA |
Held weekly paid office hours to help calculus and pre-calculus students. Graded assignments.
Hendrix College September 2002 - May 2003
Volunteer Tutor, Menifee School District Menifee, AR, USA
Volunteered to tutor grade school students weekly in nearby school district.
CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT
Haverford College 2021
Co-developed new gateway course on Foundations of Data Science First taught in Fall 2022.
Haverford College 2020
Designed new course on computational linguistics, adapted to online setting during pandemic Created extensive lecture notes and assignments for course.
Ursinus College 2018
Special Topics: Deep Computer Vision and Language
Designed special topics course on deep learning for undergraduates with no background in the subject.
Ursinus College 2017-2020
Other Courses
Created new curriculum/assignments for introductory computer science, Data Structures and Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction, and Principles of Programming Languages. Incorporated issues of ethics into HCI, AI, and Algorithms courses.
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Ursinus College Digital Humanities Python Workshop Designed and led one-day Python programming workshop for humanities faculty. |
2018 |
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University of Colorado Boulder Special Topics: Machine Learning Designed undergraduate machine learning course. |
2016 |
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University of Maryland, College Park |
2013 |
“Winter Storm” workshop
Planning Committee
Designed and led week-long workshop (“Computational Linguistics for Everyone”) designed for people with potentially no background in computational linguistics.
Designed and ran week-long Python course for language scientists at student-run workshop.
Gave lecture on machine translation to high school students.
Duke University Talent Identification Program 2010
Computer Programming
Designed and ran programming curriculum for summer program for “gifted” students.
Duke University Talent Identification Program 2008
Web Application Development
Designed programming curriculum for summer program for “gifted” students.
GUEST LECTURES
Tufts University 2022, 2023
Introduction to Cognitive and Brain Science (PSY 9)
Introduction to Natural Language Processing (March, 2022)
Computational Linguistics and Large Language Models (March, 2023)
University of Maryland, College Park 2014
Computational Linguistics I
· Introduction to Formal Semantics
University of Maryland, College Park 2014
Computational Linguistics I
Viterbi Algorithm
Emory University 2008
The Web
CSS and Javascript
ACADEMIC ADVISING
Pre-major advisees Haverford College
2022-2023: Will Cope, Bella Gattsuo, Ben Jiang, Emely Polanco
2021-2022: Kayla Patton, Xavier DeVore, Ankith Suhas Pinnamaneni, Dylan Soemitro, Alexander
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Major advisees Class of 2024: Joel Torres, Michael Rabayda, Oluwaseun Eisape Class of 2023: Sharon Wang, Laney Modlin BACHELOR’S THESIS ADVISING |
Haverford College |
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Haverford College |
Haverford, PA, USA |
Reichard,
Isaac Wasserman, Jade Rousseau
2022-2023
Caroline Gihlstorf, Topic on Large Language Models and Linguistics (title hidden while paper under anonymous peer review)
Ryan Trotter, Evaluating the Effect of Training Data Bias on Generative Adversarial Networks
Bailey Lin, Inductive Biases in Generative Adversarial Networks
Catherine Lin (Bryn Mawr), Denoising word embeddings for post-processing gender bias mitigation
Keith Mburu, Joint Learning to Improve Generalization: Automatic Music Transcription and Music Source Separation (Lit. Review)
Jordan Shand, Game Theoretical Investigation into Convergence Instability of Generative Adversarial Nets (Lit. Review)
Zach Crampton, The Application of Reinforcement Learning for National Football League Sports Gambling (Lit. Review)
Albert Dahlberg, The Propagation of Media in Text (Lit. Review)
2021-2022
Duc Trinh, Negation Learning in Transformer-based Machine Translation Models, with Jane Chandlee
Carter Langen, Analyzing the Aeneid and its Translations with Topic Models and Word Embeddings
Simon Babb, Word Order in Machine Translation
William Harris-Braun, Augmenting Neural Machine Translation Training Data for Low-resource Languages with Morphological Transducers (Lit. Review)
Asia Belt, Racial Bias in NLP Models (Lit. Review)
2020-2021
Benjamin Goldman, Verb Prediction in Japanese with Transformers
Ruikang Shi, Hallucinations in Machine Translation
Blien Habtu, 1-D TV: A Computational Investigation into the Lexical Representation of Black Womanhood In Reality Television News
Amberley Su (Bryn Mawr), Improving Sentence-final Verb Prediction in Japanese using Recurrent Neural Networks and Sentence Shuffling
Tomas Paris, Learning Hierarchical Structure in LSTMs (Lit. Review)
OTHER WORK EXPERIENCE
IBM Research–Tokyo February 2016 - July 2016
Intern Tokyo, Japan
Researched incremental question answering and performed software engineering tasks.
National Institute of Informatics June 2013 - August 2013
Research Intern Tokyo, Japan
Researched final verb prediction in Japanese using statistical language models.
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National Institute of Informatics |
May 2011 - August 2011 |
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Research Intern Researched textual entailment. |
Tokyo, Japan |
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Oak Ridge National Laboratory |
June 2012 - August 2012 |
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Summer Intern Worked on natural language processing-related projects. |
Oak Ridge, TN, USA |
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Securboration |
November 2011 - May 2012 |
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Software Engineer Worked on natural language processing-related projects. |
Washington, DC |
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University of Arizona |
April 2010 - December 2010 |
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Software Developer/Consultant Mobile programmer for psychology research project |
Tucson, AZ, USA Remote |
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Emory University |
February 2010 - March 2010 |
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Software Developer/Consultant Mobile programmer for psychology research project |
Atlanta, GA, USA |
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Acxiom Corporation |
June 2006 - June 2007 |
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Software Developer Software developer for user interfaces group. |
Little Rock, AR, USA |
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Duoshare Software |
May 2004 - August 2004 |
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Software Developer Intern |
Dallas, TX, USA |
Software developer intern, working on multilinguialization of point-of-sale software.
INVITED TALKS (NON-CONFERENCE)
University of Pennsylvania Center for Outreach, Research, and Education (MindCORE) March, 2022
Invited Talk Philadelphia, PA, USA Incremental Language Processing and What We Can Learn from Errors in NLP Models
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George Mason University Information Science |
September, 2021 |
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Invited Talk |
Fairfax, VA, USA |
Examining Racial Bias in Sports Commentary
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University of Maryland, College Park CLIP Lab |
March, 2021 |
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Invited Talk (Virtual) Examining Racial Bias in Sports Commentary |
College Park, MD, USA |
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University of Washington |
December, 2020 |
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Invited Talk (Virtual) Examining Racial Bias in Sports Commentary |
Seattle, Washington, USA |
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Seoul National University Linguistics |
August, 2020 |
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Invited Talk (Virtual) |
Seoul, South Korea |
Introspection: Examining Pathologies of Neural NLP Models and Racial Bias in Sports Commentary
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Tufts University Cognitive and Brain Science Colloquium |
March, 2020 |
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Invited Talk Bias and Beyond: AI in the Service of Power |
Boston, MA, USA |
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Widening NLP (WiNLP) Workshop 2019 @ ACL |
July, 2019 |
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Keynote How NLP is Used to Serve Power: Current and Future Trends |
Florence, Italy |
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University of Tokyo |
July, 2019 |
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Invited Talk How NLP is Used to Serve Power: Current and Future Trends |
Tokyo, Japan |
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Black in AI Workshop 2018 |
December 2018 |
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Pathologies of Neural Models Make Interpretations Difficult Oral presentation |
Montreal, BC, Canada |
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Harvey Mudd College |
February, 2018 |
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Invited Talk Reinforcement Learning for Simultaneous Machine Translation |
Claremont, California, USA |
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University of Aizu |
August 2018 |
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Invited Talk |
Aizuwakamatsu, Japan |
Reinforcement Learning and Verb Prediction for Simultaneous Machine Translation
University of Pennsylvania October 2017
Invited Talk Philadelphia, PA, USA
· Reinforcement Learning and Verb Prediction for Simultaneous Machine Translation
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Google Japan |
July 2016 |
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Reinforcement Learning and Verb Prediction for Simultaneous Machine Translation Machine Translation Group |
Tokyo, Japan |
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National Institute of Informatics |
July 2016 |
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Reinforcement Learning and Verb Prediction for Simultaneous Machine Translation Miayo Lab |
Tokyo, Japan |
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Nara Institute of Technology |
June 2016 |
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Reinforcement Learning and Verb Prediction for Simultaneous Machine Translation |
Nara, Japan |
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Kyoto University |
June 2016 |
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Incremental Prediction of Sentence-final Verbs Kurohashi-Kawahara Lab UNIVERSITY AND DEPARTMENTAL SERVICE |
Kyoto, Japan |
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Haverford College Honors Committee College-wide committee for awarding of honors to seniors. |
2022- |
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Haverford College Visiting Assistant Professor Search Committee Co-chair of Computer Science visitor search. |
2022, 2023 |
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Haverford College Chief Diversity Officer’s IDEAs Council Work on diversity and inclusion issues and initiatives for the college. |
2021 |
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Haverford College |
2020-Present |
Augmented
Human Communication Lab
CS Department Study Abroad Coordinator
Manage the logistics of study abroad, especially determining the appropriate requirements transferred courses can fill.
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Haverford College Pre-major advising Advising of first-year prospective computer science majors. |
2021- |
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Haverford College Major advising Advising of computer science majors. |
2022- |
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Ursinus College |
2018-2020 |
Digital Liberal Arts Working Group
This committee promoted digital liberal arts initiatives across campus, including designing a Digital Liberal Arts minor.
Ursinus College 2018-2020
Information Technology Committee
This committee considers plans for the selection and implementation of technology across campus.
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Ursinus College Major Advising Computer Science major advisisng |
2018-2020 |
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University of Colorado Graduate Committee |
2016-2017 |
Graduate Student Representative
The Grad Comm reviews all applications to the department and handles petitions from students, as well as curriculum and event planning.
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University of Maryland “Winter Storm” Planning Committee Committee Member Planned and took part in language science workshop Created hour-long lecture on machine translation for high school students. Created and taught multi-day Python workshop for language scientists. |
2014 |
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Hendrix College |
2002-2003 |
Volunteer Tutor
Volunteered to tutor grad school students in nearby small town on a weekly basis.
PROFESSIONAL SERVICE
• NeurIPS 2023; EMNLP 2020, 2023; NAACL 2021 Ethics Committee
• ACL Rolling Review Reviewer (2022)
• ACL 2021 Diversity and Inclusion Socicultural Inclusion Chair
• NAACL 2021 Teaching NLP Workshop 2021 Program Committee
• ACL 2021 Area Chair (Ethics in NLP, NLP for Good)
• CoNLL 2020, Area Chair (Multilinguality and Machine Translation)
• Workshop on Automatic Simultaneous Translation (AutoSimTrans) 2020 Program Committee
• EMNLP 2019, 2020 Program Committee
• EACL 2021 Program Committee
• ICLR AI for Social Good Workshop 2019, Area Chair
• AAAI 2019 Reviewer
• NAACL 2020-2021 Program Committee
• ACL 2019 Program Committee
• NAACL 2018, 2019 Student Research Workshop, Program committee
• COLING 2018, Area chair
• Black in AI Workshop 2017-2020 Program Committee
• CoNLL 2017-2019, 2021 Program Committee
• ACL 2017, 2018 Student Research Workshop Committee, Mentor
• Computer Speech and Language, Reviewer (2017)
• Language Resources and Evaluation, Reviewer (2017)
• ACL 2013, Associate Reviewer
JOURNALISTIC AND OTHER MEDIA APPEARANCES
Carnegie Mellon University Consequential Podcast 2020
Interview: Language, Power, and NLP
The Telegraph: Inside Google’s struggle to control its ‘racist’ and ‘sexist’ AI 2020
Quoted in article
IEEE Spectrum: Microsofts AI Research Draws Controversy Over Possible Disinforma-
tion Use 2019
Quoted in article
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This Week in Machine Learning Podcast Interview: Pathologies of Neural Models and Interpretability FELLOWSHIPS AND SCHOLARSHIPS |
2018 |
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NSF IGERT Language Science Fellowship |
2013-2014 |
The Undefeated: Can artificial
intelligence help us understand racial bias in sports? 2019
Sports article about EMNLP paper
University of Maryland, College Park
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GEM Fellowship GEM Foundation Private tuition fellowship and internship |
2012-2013 |
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Tuition Scholarship Emory University Partial tuition scholarship for MS in computer science |
2007-2009 |
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Chairman’s Scholarship Hendrix College Partial tuition scholarship for undergraduate studies. AWARDS |
2002-2006 |
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Arkansas Undergraduate Mathematics Competition |
2006 |
Cross-disciplinary
fellowship where I took part in language science-related research and
activities.
First Place Team
Top ranking team for solving a series of theoretical mathematics problems under time constraints.
Arkansas Undergraduate Mathematics Competition 2005
Third Place Team
Third place team for solving a series of programming problems under time constraints.
Acxiom Programming Contest 2005
Second Place Team
Second place team for solving a series of programming problems under time constraints.
Pi Mu Epsilon 2003-2006
Member
National Mathematics Honor’s Society
LANGUAGES
English (native), Japanese (advanced), Mandarin Chinese (basic)