Bill MacCartney

In June 2009, I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University. I was advised by Prof. Chris Manning, and was a member of the NLP research group and the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. My doctoral research focused on probabilistic approaches to computational semantics and the problem of natural language inference.

I am now Senior Research Scientist at Aardvark, where I work on various fun problems in machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval, and data mining. You can read more about Aardvark in the New York Times, Time Magazine, or BusinessWeek.

I'm back at Stanford this winter (2010) to teach CS224U: Natural Language Understanding with Prof. Dan Jurafsky.

My Ph.D. dissertation

Natural language inference [pdf] [ppt]
Bill MacCartney
Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, June 2009

Peer-reviewed papers

An extended model of natural logic [pdf] [ppt]
Bill MacCartney and Christopher D. Manning
The Eighth International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS-8), Tilburg, Netherlands, January 2009

A phrase-based alignment model for natural language inference [pdf] [ppt]
Bill MacCartney, Michel Galley, and Christopher D. Manning
The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-08), Honolulu, HI, October 2008

Modeling semantic containment and exclusion in natural language inference [pdf] [ppt]
Bill MacCartney and Christopher D. Manning
The 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling-08), Manchester, UK, August 2008
—received Best Paper Award—

Natural logic for textual inference [pdf] [ppt]
Bill MacCartney and Christopher D. Manning
ACL Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing, Prague, June 2007

Learning Alignments and Leveraging Natural Logic [pdf]
Nathanael Chambers, Daniel Cer, Trond Grenager, David Hall, Chloe Kiddon, Bill MacCartney, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Daniel Ramage, Eric Yeh and Christopher D. Manning
ACL Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing, Prague, June 2007

Aligning semantic graphs for textual inference and machine reading [pdf]
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Trond Grenager, Bill MacCartney, Daniel Cer, Daniel Ramage, Chloé Kiddon, Christopher D. Manning
AAAI Spring Symposium at Stanford, 2007

Learning to recognize features of valid textual entailments [pdf] [ppt]
Bill MacCartney, Trond Grenager, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Daniel Cer, Christopher D. Manning
Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT-NAACL 2006)

Generating Typed Dependency Parses from Phrase Structure Parses [pdf]
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Bill MacCartney, Christopher D. Manning
5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006)

Learning to distinguish valid textual entailments [pdf]
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Bill MacCartney, Trond Grenager, Daniel Cer, Anna Rafferty, and Christopher D. Manning
Second Pascal RTE Challenge Workshop, 2006

Robust Textual Inference using Diverse Knowledge Sources [pdf]
Rajat Raina, Aria Haghighi, Christopher Cox, Jenny Finkel, Jeff Michels, Kristina Toutanova, Bill MacCartney, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Christopher D. Manning, Andrew Y. Ng
Proceedings of the First PASCAL Challenges Workshop, 2005

Solving Logic Puzzles: From Robust Processing to Precise Semantics [pdf]
Iddo Lev, Bill MacCartney, Christopher D. Manning, Roger Levy
Proceedings of the ACL-04 Workshop on Text Meaning and Interpretation, July 2004

Practical Partition-Based Theorem Proving for Large Knowledge Bases [pdf, ps]
Bill MacCartney, Sheila A. McIlraith, Eyal Amir, Tomas Uribe
Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-03), August 2003

The Cycic Friends Network: Getting Cyc agents to reason together [pdf, ps]
James Mayfield, Tim Finin, Rajkumar Narayanaswamy, Chetan Shah, William MacCartney & Keith Goolsbey
Proceedings of the ACM CIKM-95 Intelligent Information Agents Workshop, December 1995

Invited Talks

Two Aspects of the Problem of Natural Language Inference [ppt, vid, vid]
Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, 8 October 2008

Two Related Approaches to the Problem of Textual Inference [ppt, ppt]
Columbia University, New York, 6 March 2008

Containment, Exclusion, and Implicativity: A Model of Natural Logic for Textual Inference [ppt]
Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany, 14 February 2008

Practical Partition-Based Theorem Proving for Large Knowledge Bases [ppt]
University of California at San Diego, 3 February 2003

Other Presentations

Modeling semantic containment and exclusion in natural language inference [ppt]
Bill MacCartney and Christopher D. Manning
Presented at the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling-08)
Manchester, UK, August 2008
—received Best Paper Award—

Natural logic for textual inference [ppt]
Bill MacCartney and Christopher D. Manning
Presented at the ACL 2007 Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing
Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007

Learning to recognize features of valid textual entailments [ppt]
Bill MacCartney, Trond Grenager, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Daniel Cer, Christopher D. Manning
Presented at NAACL-06
New York, NY, June 2006

NLP Lunch Tutorial: Smoothing [pdf]
Bill MacCartney
April 2005

Practical Partition-Based Theorem Proving for Large Knowledge Bases [ppt]
Bill MacCartney, Sheila A. McIlraith, Eyal Amir, Tomas Uribe
18th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-03), August 2003

Partition-Based Logical Reasoning [ppt, html/ie]
Bill MacCartney, Sheila A. McIlraith, Eyal Amir, Tomas Uribe
RKF Principal Investigators Meeting, Hilton Head SC, 13-15 November 2002

Undergraduate Thesis

On the Use of Pseudo-Empirical Induction in Mathematics [html]
William MacCartney
Senior Thesis, Princeton University, Department of Philosophy, 30 April 1990

Professional Service

I've served on the program committee or as a reviewer for several NLP conferences:

• Reviewer, NAACL-HLT 2007
• Reviewer, EMNLP 2008
• Reviewer, NAACL-HLT 2009
• Program Committee, TextInfer 2009

Other stuff I did before

Knowledge Systems Lab, Stanford University, Researcher, 2002-2003
AI research. Development & testing of algorithms for partition-based reasoning in large knowledge bases. More...

SayIt, Inc., Cofounder, VP Production, 1999-2000
Website production: process management, UI design, information architecture, user experience analysis. More...

D. E. Shaw & Co., Quant/Trader, 1996-1998
Fixed-income arbitrage trading, computational modeling. Managed $5B of Japanese bonds & derivatives. More...

Cycorp, Inc., Researcher, Knowledge Engineer, 1994-1995
AI research. Led effort to deploy Cyc in a multi-agent architecture to achieve distributed inferencing. More...

TestTakers, Inc., Head of Research & Development, 1991-1994
Small business, many roles. Led curriculum development. Built core database app. Lots of teaching. More...

J. W. Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Fulbright scholar, 1990-1991
One year of graduate study in philosophy of language. Developed German language skills. More...

Princeton University, B.A. in Philosophy, summa cum laude, 1986-1990
Prize for best senior thesis in logic and epistemology. GPA 4.0/3.9. GRE 800/800/800. LSAT 180. More...