Dr. Sandiway Fong

Dr. Fong obtained a BS (Bachelor of science) in Computing Science at the Imperial College of Science and Technology of the University of London in 1985. He received his S.M. (Master of Science) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1986 and his PhD in 1991 also from MIT. The following short biography is available from his website.

Short biography

After completing my undergraduate degree, in 1985, I came to the United States to do graduate work at the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory (then a separate entity from LCS) at the Masschusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Masschusetts. I received a S.M. (Master of Science) degree in 1986. I spent a little time at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne on qualitative reasoning for large-scale computer systems. I developed a strong interest in natural language processing and formal linguistics. (My Ph.D minor is in Linguistics.) My Ph.D thesis work was on the implementation of Government-and-Binding (GB) theory, a popular theory in the so-called Principles-and-Parameters framework.

After completing my Ph.D, in Fall 1991, I joined the recently founded NEC Research Institute in Princeton New Jersey. (I believe it was just a couple of years old when I joined.) This was a small institute initially set up to do fundamental research in the computer and physical sciences, wholly funded by NEC Japan. I formed a small natural language processing group. Later on, the focus of the institute became collaborative applied research with NEC C&C Laboratories (Japan) and eventually it merged to become NEC Laboratories America. I did some proprietary work on machine translation and ended up collaborating on machine translation evaluation for Japanese to English translation. I also did consultant work with researchers at the University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM) and with Kanda University of International Studies (KUIS) of Chiba, Japan on their COE project.

In 2003, I moved to the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. I took a joint appointment in Linguistics and Computer Science. In addition to having a traditional linguistics program, the Linguistics Department here is also pushing forwards with its efforts in the Human Language Technology (HLT) area. Since my research topics are at the intersection of computer science and formal linguistics, this position meshes well with my current interests in multilingual parsing and modern syntactic theory, machine translation evaluation, ontolinguistics, WordNet, computational lexical semantics and computational morphology. 

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