Micha Elsner, a Ph.D. student researching natural language processing with Eugene Charniak and Mark Johnson in the Brown Laboratory for Linguistic Information Processing (BLLIP), was recently awarded an inaugural Google Fellowship. This two-year fellowship includes financial support for tuition and fees as well as funding for conference attendance and travel, a personal computer and an Android-powered phone.

Micha’s research focuses on computer programs for understanding discourse --- the way the meanings of individual sentences in a document merge to form the meaning of the whole. His work has been presented at several conferences, most recently at the NAACL-HLT 2009 ...