interview profile

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/linguist/newsletters_and_events/newsSpr06.pdf

Rob Malouf, Ph.D., Stanford

by Grace Kim

As I stepped into his sunny office on the third floor of the Business Administration

Building for an interview, I was instantly reminded of my first meeting with Dr. Robert P.

Malouf. A shock of pre-Raphaelite, red hair and beard belied the soothing timbre of his voice as

he lectured about the history of text corpora. Many of his students (including myself!) found it

quite a challenge at first not to be lulled by his voice as we scrambled to take down notes. It

wasn’t long however, before his wealth of knowledge and keen insights about the diverse array

of methods that exist for solving a linguistic problem stimulated interest amongst his pupils, and

still continues to do so today.

During my interview with Dr. Malouf, I discovered quite a few interesting facts about

him, some of which perhaps, few may be aware. For instance, Dr. Malouf started out as a

Computer Science major as an undergraduate, but became increasingly fascinated by the study of

Linguistics, eventually leading him to earn a bachelor’s degree in both Linguistics and Computer

Science at University of Buffalo in 1992. He earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1998,

which had initially involved some fieldwork with the Potawatomi Indian tribe. He recalls the

attempt as having been “a miserable failure”.

Startled, I ask, “What do you mean?”

He replies humorously, “No one spoke the language. No one in the entire state of

Kansas!”

Still, the obstacle seems only to be have been an amusing wrinkle an otherwise stellar

career in Computational Linguistics, which includes having worked on projects like the Alpino

system, a question-answer system which utilizes a large-scale grammar and parser for Dutch, as

well as numerous other projects on subjects like head driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG)

and statistical modeling of language at the School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences at

the University of Groningen, and more recently at SDSU, Armenian relative clauses, educational

materials in Mixtec, as well as text and web mining, just to name a few. His numerous

publications include a book published in 2000 entitled Mixed Categories in the Hierarchical

Lexicon, along with a host of book chapters dealing with both computational and theoretical

linguistics, as well as an impressive list of publications, his most recent being Disjunctive rule

ordering in finite state morphology, which was presented at the 41st Meeting of the Chicago

Linguistics Society in 2005. When asked what he enjoys the most about linguistics, he quickly

responds with, “Solving difficult problems and figuring out the most elegant rules for why

[something] happens.”

Yet, amidst all his contributions and varying roles, many students will remember him for

his devotion to teaching, and his gentle patience in the classroom. When asked what he has

learned from teaching, he thoughtfully reflects, “I’ve learned through teaching that there are lots

of different ways of looking at things, and that students often have different views on things.”

When asked what attracted him to SDSU, he replies that its research atmosphere afforded a kind

of independence from the tight theoretical restrictions with which academic

institutions often approaches the CL, hampering the industry’s potential to explore some of the

more practical, trade applications of the field such as programming, mathematics, and web

mining to name a few. There was also a thriving community of CL researchers already

established in San Diego, including Dr. Jean Mark Gawron, also at SDSU.

So, what does he do for fun in between research, publications, and teaching? You might

be surprised to find out that he plays the banjo, and has recently taken up racing in his Ford

Contour. He also enjoys building speakers to play his favorite music, as well as backpacking and

hiking. Much of his time nowadays, however, is devoted to relishing his role as a husband to his

wife Deirdre, and father to two adorable boys, James (6) and Elias (2).

When asked to speculate on the future of CL, he hopes that there will be a shift from big

problems to smaller problems, starting with a move away from projects dealing with machine

translation to more practical applications of CL.