work

Turns out my portfolio has actually grown significantly over the years! To keep it brief, here are a few highlights I'm proud of sharing with the world:

• [2020] Shoutout to my friend and co-worker ☞ James LeDoux ☜ for documenting our journey to personalizing the home feed in the BF app! Read about multi-armed bandits in Python and how to evaluate them offline (using Replay) on his blog.
• [2018] In grad school, I got to take Kyunghyun Cho's class on "Natural Language Processing with Representation Learning". On a side note, the lecture note is incredible and actually made me want to go to NYU in the first place. I learned a lot about writing PyTorch that year:
• Bag-of-words sentiment classifier
• Neural networks (CNN/RNN) for natural language inference
• Final group project on neural machine translation!
• [2018] We published some applied and theoretical linguistics work on arXiv. First, we tackled the Fake News Challenge (FNC-1) by "Debunking Fake News One Feature at a Time". Second, we studied "Neural Networks and Quantifier Conservativity: Does Data Distribution Affect Learnability?".
• [2017] People regularly reach out to me asking for advice on how to break into data science, and specifically, "How to get started in NLP". I finally wrote a blog post about it and I'm trying my best to keep it up to date! Happily taking suggestions as well.
• [2016] Back in the day I was working for a travel AI startup called WayBlazer. I recently remembered that we published a whitepaper about our work and mission.
• [2015] I wrote my undergraduate thesis on "String to Semantic Graph Alignment". I also wrote a brief survey on Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR).
• [2014] As an intern, I worked on improving resume parsing models at Textkernel. Here's my internship report and the subsequent research paper we published at NAACL-HTL 2015.

If you're intested, please poke around out my GitHub and Medium presence for more posts and projects! ☺

about

Hi! I'm Melanie. I'm originally from Germany, but I've lived in the U.S. for over 5 years now. I have a BS in Computational Linguistics, and earned a MS in Computer Science from NYU as well. I've strayed away from NLP quite a bit when I started working in data science, but so far I've been enjoying become a more well-rounded ☯ data person ☯

FAQ!

• Q: Can you help me become a data scientist? A: Maybe! I'm happy to answer specific questions, but it's very, very difficult to give generic career advice in this field. I just picked up a new book called "Build a Career in Data Science", chances are you might find it useful too.
• Q: What is that accent? A: It's German. One day I'm going to hire a voice coach to help me iron out my R's.
• Q: Favorite books? Currently reading? A: All time favorites: The Book Thief and When Breath Becomes Air. Currently reading: The Idiot by Elif Batuman.
• Q: How did you make this stunning website? A: I stole this template from @imfunnieee, all credit to them! Over time I've tried everything from hardcoding a static HTML page to using Wordpress, Jekyll, Squarespace, and so on, now we're here. Does this cycle ever end? (Seriously let me know!)

contact

I'm most easily reached via my email address: ★ first dot last at youknowwhichmail dot com ★