Nate Krasner, a senior at the GMU CS department, has been awarded an Honorable Mention for the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award for 2022.

Krasner was selected to participate in the NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergrads (REU) site that GMU CS ran over the summer, which focused on Educational Data Mining. During a 12-week period, Krasner and Antonios Anastasopoulos (Assistant Professor in CS), along with Miriam Wanner (sophomore at UVA) worked closely on one of the most exciting and hard problems in Natural Language Processing, studying what influences cross-lingual transfer in multilingual models, and in particular what drives strong zero-shot performance. 

Put plainly, they sought to understand why our models perform well on some languages on which they have never been trained, and why they perform badly in others. Understanding which factors influence cross-lingual parsing performance for low-resource languages will allow us to build language technology for the thousands of languages that are currently under-served (most of them endangered or spoken by under-represented communities) efficiently and quickly, bringing language technologies to the millions of their speakers.

Krasner and Anastasopoulos' findings will be presented in 2022 at the annual conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in Dublin.

More info of the NSF-REU site can be found here: https://cs.gmu.edu/reu/ 

More info of the research can be found at the GMU NLP research group: https://nlp.cs.gmu.edu/