I am a fifth year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Stanford,
in the Natural Language Processing Group. My advisor is Prof. Jurafsky.

My primary research interests are unsupervised parsing and grammar induction.

In my third year I TA-ed Google's Pandu Nayak's and (then-)Yahoo!'s Prabhakar Raghavan's graduate course,
Information Retrieval and Web Search (CS.276 / Ling.286).

The year before I TA-ed Prof. Manning's graduate course,
Natural Language Processing (CS.224N / Ling.284).

My Erdős number is 2.

Scholarly Publications & Patents

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, and Daniel Jurafsky. 2012.
  Bootstrapping Dependency Grammar Inducers from Incomplete Sentence Fragments via Austere Models. [pdf, bib; official, slides]
  In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Grammatical Inference (ICGI 2012).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, and Daniel Jurafsky. 2012.
  Three Dependency-and-Boundary Models for Grammar Induction. [pdf, bib; official, poster]
  In Proceedings of the 2012 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CoNLL 2012).

• Wanxiang Che, Valentin I. Spitkovsky, and Ting Liu. 2012.
  A Comparison of Chinese Parsers for Stanford Dependencies. [pdf, bib; official, slides]
  In Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2012).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, and Daniel Jurafsky. 2012.
  Capitalization Cues Improve Dependency Grammar Induction. [pdf, bib; official, slides]
  In NAACL HLT 2012 Workshop on Inducing Linguistic Structure (WILS 2012).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky and Angel X. Chang. 2012.
  A Cross-Lingual Dictionary for English Wikipedia Concepts. [pdf, bib; official, wikiPapers, slides, post, data]
  In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012).

• Mihai Surdeanu, Sonal Gupta, John Bauer, David McClosky, Angel X. Chang, Valentin I. Spitkovsky, and Christopher D. Manning. 2011.
  Stanford's Distantly-Supervised Slot-Filling System. [pdf, bib; official, data]
  In Proceedings of the Fourth Text Analysis Conference (TAC 2011).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky and Angel X. Chang. 2011.
  Strong Baselines for Cross-Lingual Entity Linking. [pdf, bib; official]
  In Proceedings of the Fourth Text Analysis Conference (TAC 2011).

• Angel X. Chang, Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Eneko Agirre, and Christopher D. Manning. 2011.
  Stanford-UBC Entity Linking at TAC-KBP, Again. [pdf, bib; official]
  In Proceedings of the Fourth Text Analysis Conference (TAC 2011).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, Angel X. Chang, and Daniel Jurafsky. 2011.
  Unsupervised Dependency Parsing without Gold Part-of-Speech Tags. [pdf, bib; official, poster, data]
  In Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2011).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, and Daniel Jurafsky. 2011.
  Lateen EM: Unsupervised Training with Multiple Objectives, Applied to Dependency Grammar Induction. [pdf, bib; official, poster]
  In Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2011).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, and Daniel Jurafsky. 2011.
  Punctuation: Making a Point in Unsupervised Dependency Parsing. [pdf, bib; official, slides]
  In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2011).

• Mihai Surdeanu, David McClosky, Julie Tibshirani, John Bauer, Angel X. Chang, Valentin I. Spitkovsky, and Christopher D. Manning. 2010.
  A Simple Distant Supervision Approach for the TAC-KBP Slot Filling Task. [pdf, bib; official, slides, data]
  In Proceedings of the Third Text Analysis Conference (TAC 2010).

• Angel X. Chang, Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Eric Yeh, Eneko Agirre, and Christopher D. Manning. 2010.
  Stanford-UBC Entity Linking at TAC-KBP. [pdf, bib; official, poster]
  In Proceedings of the Third Text Analysis Conference (TAC 2010).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, Daniel Jurafsky, and Christopher D. Manning. 2010.
  Viterbi Training Improves Unsupervised Dependency Parsing. [pdf, bib; official, slides]
  In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2010).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Daniel Jurafsky, and Hiyan Alshawi. 2010.
  Profiting from Mark-Up: Hyper-Text Annotations for Guided Parsing. [pdf, bib; official, slides, data]
  In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2010).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, and Daniel Jurafsky. 2010.
  From Baby Steps to Leapfrog: How “Less is More” in Unsupervised Dependency Parsing. [pdf, bib; official, slides, data]
  In Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 11th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL HLT 2010).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Hiyan Alshawi, and Daniel Jurafsky. 2009.
  Baby Steps: How “Less is More” in Unsupervised Dependency Parsing. [pdf, bib; official, poster, data]
  In NIPS 2009 Workshop on Grammar Induction, Representation of Language and Language Learning (GRLL 2009).

• Eneko Agirre, Angel X. Chang, Daniel S. Jurafsky, Christopher D. Manning, Valentin I. Spitkovsky, and Eric Yeh. 2009.
  Stanford-UBC at TAC-KBP. [pdf, bib; official, slides]
  In Proceedings of the Second Text Analysis Conference (TAC 2009).

  ---

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky.
  G-Mail Ratings.
  To be filed (GP-508-00-US).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Sumit Agarwal, Gokul Rajaram, and Brian Axe.
  Keywordless Advertising.
  To be filed (GP-470-00-US).

• Ross Koningstein, Steve Lawrence, and Valentin Spitkovsky.
  Associating Features with Entities, Such as Categories or Web Page Documents, and/or Weighing Such Features.
  Filed on December 30, 2004; application serial no. 11/026,497 (GP-268-00-US).

• Valentin Spitkovsky.
  Determining Online Ad Targeting Information, Such as Keyword-Targeting Suggestions.
  Filed on December 20, 2004; application serial no. 11/017,424 (GP-390-00-US).

• Valentin Spitkovsky.
  Mixing Items, Such as Ad Targeting Keyword Suggestions, from Heterogeneous Sources.
  Filed on October 1, 2004; application serial no. 10/957,337 (GP-325-00-US).

• Ross Koningstein, Valentin Spitkovsky, Georges Harik, and Noam Shazeer.
  Suggesting and/or Providing Targeting Criteria for Advertisements.
  Filed on December 31st, 2003; application serial no. 10/750,451 (GP-099-00-US).

• Ross Koningstein, Valentin Spitkovsky, Georges Harik, and Noam Shazeer.
  Using Concepts for Ad Targeting.
  Filed on November 24th, 2003; application serial no. 10/721,010 (GP-083-00-US).

  ---

• Rahul Simha, Weidong Cai and Valentin Spitkovsky. 2001.
  Simulated N-Body: New Particle Physics-Based Heuristics for a Euclidean Location-Allocation Problem. [ps.gz; official]
  Journal of Heuristics, 7 (1).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky. 2000.
  A Fast Genomic Dictionary. [ps.gz]
  M.Eng. Thesis, MIT (EECS).

• Lior Pachter, Serafim Batzoglou, Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Eric Banks, Eric S. Lander, Daniel J. Kleitman, and Bonnie Berger. 1999.
  A Dictionary-Based Approach for Gene Annotation. [ps.gz; official]
  Journal of Computational Biology, 6 (3/4).

• Lior Pachter, Serafim Batzoglou, Valentin I. Spitkovsky, William S. Beebee, Jr., Eric S. Lander, Bonnie Berger, and Daniel J. Kleitman. 1999.
  A Dictionary Based Approach for Gene Annotation. [ps.gz]
  In Proceedings of the Third Annual International Conference on Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB'99).

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky. 1993.
  CAPSULE. [official]
  Jefferson Laboratory Technical Notes (CEBAF-TN-93-066).
  

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky. 1993.
  CAVGLE. [official]
  Jefferson Laboratory Technical Notes (CEBAF-TN-93-065).
  

• Valentin I. Spitkovsky. 1993.
  CAVTEK. [official]
  Jefferson Laboratory Technical Notes (CEBAF-TN-93-064).

Professional Service

• Reviewer for the Computational Linguistics (CL) journal.

• Reviewer, in the NLP-enabled Technology track, for the 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2013).

• Reviewer, in the Parsing track, for the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2012).

• Reviewer for the Eighth Asia Information Retrieval Societies Conference (AIRS 2012).

• Reviewer, in the Syntax and Parsing track, for the 2012 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CoNLL 2012).

• Reviewer for the Workshop on Inducing Linguistic Structure (WILS) at NAACL HLT 2012.

• Reviewer for the Joint Workshop on Unsupervised and Semi-Supervised Learning in Natural Language Processing (ROBUS-UNSUP) at EACL 2012.

• Reviewer, in the Syntax track, for the 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP 2011).

• Reviewer for the Workshop on Robust Unsupervised and Semisupervised Methods in Natural Language Processing (ROBUS 2011) at RANLP 2011.

• Reviewer, in the Unsupervised Learning track, for the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-11).

• Panelist and reviewer for the First Workshop on Unsupervised Learning in NLP (UNSUP-2011) at EMNLP 2011.

• Reviewer, in the Syntax and Parsing track, for the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2011).

• Reviewer for the Fifteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2011).

• Reviewer, in the Syntax and Parsing track, for the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (ACL HLT 2011).

• Reviewer, in the Statistical and Machine Learning Methods track, for the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2010).