William Merrill
Young Investigator (Postdoc)
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWilliam Merrill is a computational linguist and theoretician of language models with 15 years of experience bridging NLP, linguistics, and formal languages. Currently a postdoc at the Allen Institute for AI and soon an assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, he studies what algorithms large language models can implement and what fundamentally lies beyond their computational reach. His work blends PhD-level theory from NYU with industry research stints at Google and AI2, probing whether predictive "autocomplete" learning can capture complete linguistic and world knowledge. He has a track record of building practical ML systems (from deployed ad analytics at Google to state-of-the-art NLP tools in academia) alongside rigorous theoretical results, and brings a rare mix of formal language expertise and production ML experience.
15 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science at Yale University
Icelandic, Latin, norse, old, English
Stackoverflow
414reputation
164kreached
5answers
6questions
Github Skills (42)
pytorch10
python10
data-science10
puzzle10
java10
deep-learning10
natural-language-processing10
nlp10
game-development10
automata-theory10
machine-learning9
inference9
coders9
gpu9
parser8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
viking-sudo-rm/DiachronicPOSTagger
Apr 2018 - Apr 2020
A diachronic part-of-speech tagger for historical American English using deep learning.
Contributions:19 commits, 1 PR, 26 pushes in 1 year 11 months
deep-learningpart-of-speech-tagger
viking-sudo-rm/formal-language-understanding
Sep 2021 - Jun 2022
Contributions:65 commits, 51 pushes in 9 months
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