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Garrett-Nicolai

Garrett Nicolai

Assistant Professor of Teaching,
Department of Linguistics,
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
e-mail: gnicolai AT mail DOT ubc DOT ca


A bit about me

I’m an Assistant Professor doing research in natural language processing.
I have a background in AI and Linguistics, and utilize both perspectives in my research.

I am the current President for SIGMORPHON , and will be co-organizing our 2022 workshop .

When not in the lab, I’m an avid reader of fiction, with Historical Fiction and Horror Fiction being particular favourites.
It’s pronounced /sə·ˈskætʃ·ə·wən/ (and those schwas are really short…), not /ˈsæ·ˌskætʃ·ə·ˌwɑn/, and the capital city is /rə·ˈdʒai·nə/, not /rə·ˈdʒi·nə/ or /rə·ˈgi·nə/, Latin notwithstanding.

Research Interests

My current research interests include, but are not limited to:

  • The application of Linguistic methods to computational analysis of natural language.
  • Inflectional processes, particularly with respect to analysis and generation of words.
  • Incorporation of morphology in downstream tasks.
  • Low-data settings, and how they impact traditional transduction methods.
  • Phonological processes, and how they interact with morphology.
  • Language interaction, be it L1 interference, cognates, or translation.

    • Publications

    Computational Linguistics

    2019

  • Garrett Nicolai and David Yarowsky Learning Morphosyntactic Analyzers from the Bible via Iterative Annotation Projection across 26 Languages Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Compuational Linguistics Florence, Italy, July, 2019. Paper Appendix
  • Arya D. McCarthy, Ekaterina Vylomova, Shijie Wu, Chaitanya Malaviya, Lawrence Wolf-Sonkin, Garrett Nicolai, Christo Kirov, Miikka Silfverberg, Sebastian J Mielke, Jeffrey Heinz, Ryan Cotterell, Mans Hulden. The SIGMORPHON 2019 Shared Task: Morphological Analysis in Context and Cross-Lingual Transfer for Inflection. Florence, Italy, August 2019.




    • 2018

  • Garrett Nicolai, Saeed Najafi, and Grzegorz Kondrak String Transduction with Target Language Models and Insertion Handling Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Computational Research in Morphology, Phonology, and Phonetics. Brussels, Belgium, October, 2018. Paper


  • Ryan Cotterell, Christo Kirov, John Sylak-Glassman, Géraldine Walther, Ekaterina Vylomova, Arya D. McCarthy, Katharina Kann, Sebastian Mielke, Garrett Nicolai, Miikka Silfverberg, David Yarowsky, Jason Eisner, and Mans Hulden The CoNLL--SIGMORPHON 2018 Shared Task: Universal Morphological Reinflection Proceedings of the CoNLL--SIGMORPHON 2018 Shared Task: Universal Morphological Reinflection Brussels, Belgium, October, 2018.




    • 2017

  • Garrett Nicolai, Bradley Hauer, Mohammad Motallebi, Saeed Najafi, and Grzegorz Kondrak If you can’t beat them, join them: the University of Alberta system description Proceedings of the CoNLL SIGMORPHON 2017 Shared Task: Universal Morphological Reinflection. Vancouver, Canada, August, 2017. Paper


  • Garrett Nicolai, and Grzegorz Kondrak Morphological Analysis without Expert Annotation The 15th Meeting of the European Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics, Valencia, Spain, April, 2017. Paper Poster


  • Bradley Hauer, Garrett Nicolai, and Grzegorz Kondrak Bootstrapping Unsupervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction The 15th Meeting of the European Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics, Valencia, Spain, April, 2017 Paper Poster




    • 2016

  • Garrett Nicolai, and Grzegorz Kondrak Leveraging Inflection Tables for Stemming and Lemmatization. The 54th Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, Berlin, Germany, August, 2016. Paper Poster


  • Garrett Nicolai, Lei Yao, and Grzegorz Kondrak Morphological Segmentation Can Improve Syllabification. The 14th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, Berlin, Germany, August, 2016. Paper Poster


  • Garrett Nicolai, Bradley Hauer, Adam St Arnaud, and Grzegorz Kondrak Morphological Reinflection via Discriminative String Transduction The 14th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, Berlin, Germany, August, 2016. Paper Poster




    • 2015

  • Garrett Nicolai, Bradley Hauer, Mohammad Salameh, Adam St Arnaud, Ying Xu, Lei Yao, and Grzegorz Kondrak. Multiple System Combination for Transliteration. The Fifth Named Entities Workshop (NEWS 2015), Beijing, China, August, 2015. Paper


  • Garrett Nicolai, and Grzegorz Kondrak. English Spelling is not "close to optimal". 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2015), Denver, CO, June, 2015. Paper Poster


  • Garrett Nicolai, Colin Cherry, and Grzegorz Kondrak. Inflection Generation as Discriminative String Transduction. 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2015), Denver, CO, June, 2015. Paper


  • Garrett Nicolai, Colin Cherry, and Grzegorz Kondrak. Morpho-syntactic Regularities in Continuous Word Representations: A Multilingual Study. Workshop on Vector Space Modeling for NLP. Denver, CO, June, 2015. Paper Poster




    • 2014

  • Garrett Nicolai, and Grzegorz Kondrak. Does the Phonology of L1 Show Up in L2 Texts? The 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Baltimore, MD, June, 2014. Paper


  • Garrett Nicolai, Md Asadul Islam, and Russ Greiner. Native Language Identification Using Probabilistic Graphical Models. International Conference on Electrical Information and Communication Techonology (EICT), Khulna, Bangladesh, March, 2014. Paper




    • 2013

  • Garrett Nicolai, Bradley Hauer, Mohammad Salameh, Lei Yao, and Grzegorz Kondrak. Cognate and Misspelling Features for Natural Language Identification. Eighth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications. NLI Shared Task. Atlanta, GA, June, 2013. Paper Poster






    • Artificial Intelligence

    2010

  • Garrett Nicolai, and Robert J. Hilderman. Algorithms for Evolving No-Limit Texas Hold'em Poker Playing Agents. Proceedings of the International Conference on Evolutionary Computation (ICEC'10), Valencia, Spain, October, 2010.


    • 2009

  • Garrett Nicolai, and Robert J. Hilderman. No-Limit Texas Hold'em Poker Agents Created with Evolutionary Neural Networks. Proceedings of 5th IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG'09), Milan, Italy, September, 2009.


    • 2008

  • Garrett J. Nicolai. Evolutionary Methods for Learning No-Limit Texas Hold'em Poker. M.Sc. Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Regina November, 2008.


    • 2007

  • Brien Beattie, Garrett Nicolai, David Gerhard, and Robert J. Hilderman. Pattern Classification in No-Limit Poker: A Head-Start Evolutionary Approach. Proceedings of the 20th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI'07), Montreal, Canada, May, 2007.




    • Last Updated: November, 2021