I am a PhD student in the Center for Language and Speech Processing at The Johns Hopkins University working with Professor Frederick Jelinek. My research focuses on the automatic reconstruction of disfluent and ungrammatical spontaneous speech output via syntactic analysis and linguistic formalisms for meaning extraction.
(Read about our work with meaning representations in language understanding for SMT and speech reconstruction.)

I was born in Pittsburgh, PA, grew up in Raleigh, NC, and then returned to Pittsburgh to obtain a BS in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. While at CMU, I did my senior research work with Professor Richard Stern, working to develop alternative methods of front end feature extraction for speech recognition.

I acquired my M.S.E. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in December 2003 and hope to defend my Ph.D. thesis in late 2008 or early 2009.

Using Neural Network Language Models for LVCSR: Presentation given to JHU ECE Reading Group (based on Schwenk & Gauvain 2002)

Introduction to Lexical-Function Grammars: Presentation given to JHU NLP Reading Group (based on Kaplan & Brenan 1982)

More in-depth descriptions of my recent endeavors to date to come.

As an undergraduate I had the opportunity to spend my summers interning with Intel's Speech Applications Group (2000) and Microsoft's dotNet Speech product group (2001, 2002).

In the summer of 2003, I participated in the JHU Summer Workshop, working with George Foster, Simona Gandrabur, and others to research applications and approaches for confidence estimation for natural language applications such as machine translation. Our team's final report and other resources are available here. A reduced version of the paper was presented at COLING 2004 - view here.

In the summer of 2004, I took an internship at BBN Technologies with the Speech Recognition group under John Makhoul. I worked with Owen Kimball and Richard Schwartz on the EARS Rich Transcription for Conversational Telephone Speech task, using topic-specific information to dynamically alter language models in an effort to improve ASR performance.

• E. Fitzgerald and F. Jelinek. "Linguistic Resources for Reconstructing Spontaneous Speech Text". In Proceedings of LREC-2008, Marrakech, Morocco. 2008. [pdf]
• E. Fitzgerald. "Speech Reconstruction Annotation Guide for Conversational Telephone Speech Conversations", version 5.2. October 2007. [doc]
• Y. Zhang, V. Kordoni, and E. Fitzgerald. "Partial Parse Selection for Robust Deep Processing". In Proceedings of ACL Workshop on Deep Linguistic Processing, pg. 128-135. Prague, Czech Republic. 2007. [pdf]
• J. Blatz, E. Fitzgerald, G. Foster, S. Gandrabur, C. Goutte, A. Kulesza, A. Sanchis, and N. Ueffing. "Confidence Estimation for Machine Translation". In COLING-2004, Geneva, Switzerland. 2004. [pdf]

In the summer of 2005, I started a group for the women graduate students in the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering called Women of Whiting. We've had many successful and well-attended social and professional events thus far, and have a busy schedule ahead of us for the coming semester! See our webpage for more details!

I'm also involved in planning the Enloe High School class of 1998 10-year reunion.

I love traveling. From January to May 2006, I lived and worked in Prague, continuing my research alongside the UFAL group at Charles University. Follow my personal blog for details of that and other international trips!