Alona Fyshe, PhD, MSc, BSc
Pronouns: She/her/hers
Contact
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Science - Computing Science
- alona@ualberta.ca
- Address
-
356 Athabasca Hall
9119 116 St NWEdmonton ABT6G 2E8
Overview
Area of Study / Keywords
natural language processing neuroscience machine learning
About
I hold a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Artificial Intelligence Chair. I am a fellow of the “Learning in Machines and Brains” CIFAR Program, and a fellow of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (amii). My BSc and MSc are from the University of Alberta, and my PhD is from Carnegie Mellon University.
Research
My interests are Computational Linguistics, Machine Learning and Neuroscience. My work combines all three of these areas to study the way the human brain processes language.
Models of language meaning (semantics) are typically built using large bodies of text (corpora) collected from the Internet. These corpora often contain billions of words, and thus cover the majority of the ways words are used. However, to build computer programs that truly understand language, and can understand more rare and nuanced word usage, we need algorithms that can generalize beyond common word usage. By collecting brain images of people reading, we can explore how the human brain handles the complexities of language, which could inspire the next generation of semantic models.
Teaching
I teach graduate course on machine learning and neuroscience in both the computing science and psychology departments. In the past I have also taught upper level machine learning in CS (466/566) and psych 354.
Courses
CMPUT 399 - Topics in Computing Science
This topics course is designed for a one on one individual study course between a student and an instructor. Prerequisites are determined by the instructor in the course outline. See Note (3) above.
Featured Publications
Alona Fyshe, Leila Wehbe, Partha Talukdar, Brian Murphy, and Tom Mitchell
North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT).
Haoyan Xu, Brian Murphy, Alona Fyshe
Empirical Methods for Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).
Brian Murphy, Leila Wehbe, Alona Fyshe
Language, Cognition, and Computational Models, Cambridge University Press.
Dhanush Dharmaretnam, Alona Fyshe
The North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2018).