Philip Resnik Recognized as 2020 ACL Fellow

Professor of Linguistics honored for extraordinary research.

By Maria Herd | UMIACS

A faculty member in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) and the College of Arts and Humanities has been selected as a 2020 Fellow by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the premier international scientific and professional society for those working on computational problems involving human language.

Philip Resnik, a professor of linguistics with a joint appointment in UMIACS, is one of nine Fellows selected by the ACL this year.

This significant honor is reserved for researchers whose contributions to the field have been the most extraordinary in terms of scientific and technical excellence, service to the association and the community, and/or educational or outreach activities with broader impact.

Resnik was specifically noted for his significant contributions to symbolic-statistical methods for natural language processing, multilinguality and the interdisciplinary study of language.

As a member (and, periodically, director) of the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Laboratory in UMIACS, Resnik focuses his scientific work on challenges involving high social impact that can best be solved by integrating human knowledge and expertise with the automated analysis of human language.

Recent research by Resnik includes: developing computational models to better understand how political decisions are made; analyzing text responses in COVID-19 survey data and developing machine learning algorithms to help assess mental illness online.

“I'm honored to have been named an ACL Fellow,” said Resnik, who is also active in the University of Maryland Language Science Center. “Extra sweet is that this year's cohort also includes Noah Smith, who got his start in computational linguistics as my undergraduate advisee.”

Smith graduated from Maryland in 2001 with a double degree in computer science and linguistics. He is currently a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington.