I've been an assistant professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park since September, 2004. I'm a member of the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) Lab at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).

In August 2004, I completed my Ph.D. in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department (EECS) from MIT, where I was working in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). My Ph.D. thesis was titled Event Structure and the Encoding of Arguments: The Syntax of the Mandarin and English Verb Phrase. (UMIACS).

My current research lies at the intersection of information retrieval, information science, and computational linguistics, in an area called question answering (QA). The goal is to develop information access systems that return "answers", not merely "hits".