Rob Malouf, Ph.D., Stanford by Grace Kim As I stepped into his sunny office on the third floor of…
Rob Malouf, Ph.D., Stanford by Grace Kim As I stepped into his sunny office on the third floor of…
Rob Malouf, Ph.D., Stanfordby Grace KimAs I stepped into his sunny office on the third floor of the Business AdministrationBuilding for an interview, I was instantly reminded of my first meeting with Dr. Robert P.Malouf. A shock of pre-Raphaelite, red hair and beard belied the soothing timbre of his voice ashe lectured about the history of text corpora. Many of his students (including myself!) found itquite a challenge at first not to be lulled by his voice as we scrambled to take down notes. Itwasn’t long however, before his wealth of knowledge and keen insights about the diverse arrayof methods that exist for solving a linguistic problem stimulated interest amongst his pupils, andstill continues to do so today.During my interview with Dr. Malouf, I discovered quite a few interesting facts abouthim, some of which perhaps, few may be aware. For instance, Dr. Malouf started out as amajor as an undergraduate, but became increasingly fascinated by the study ofLinguistics, eventually leading him to earn a bachelor’s degree in both Linguistics and ComputerScience at University of Buffalo in 1992. He earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1998,which had initially involved some fieldwork with the Potawatomi Indian tribe. He recalls theattempt as having been “a miserable failure”.Startled, I ask, “What do you mean?”He replies humorously, “No one spoke the language. No one in the entire state ofKansas!”Still, the obstacle seems only to be have been an amusing wrinkle an otherwise stellarcareer in Computational Linguistics, which includes having worked on projects like the Alpinosystem, a question-answer system which utilizes a large-scale grammar and parser for Dutch, aswell as numerous other projects on subjects like head driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG)and statistical modeling of language at the School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences atthe University of Groningen, and more recently at SDSU, Armenian relative clauses, educationalmaterials in Mixtec, as well as text and web mining, just to name a few. His numerouspublications include a book published in 2000 entitled Mixed Categories in the HierarchicalLexicon, along with a host of book chapters dealing with both computational and theoreticallinguistics, as well as an impressive list of publications, his most recent being Disjunctive ruleordering in finite state morphology, which was presented at the 41st Meeting of the ChicagoLinguistics Society in 2005. When asked what he enjoys the most about linguistics, he quicklyresponds with, “Solving difficult problems and figuring out the most elegant rules for why[something] happens.”Yet, amidst all his contributions and varying roles, many students will remember him forhis devotion to teaching, and his gentle patience in the classroom. When asked what he haslearned from teaching, he thoughtfully reflects, “I’ve learned through teaching that there are lotsof different ways of looking at things, and that students often have different views on things.”When asked what attracted him to SDSU, he replies that its research atmosphere afforded a kindof independence from the tight theoretical restrictions with which academicinstitutions often approaches the CL, hampering the industry’s potential to explore some of themore practical, trade applications of the field such as programming, mathematics, and webmining to name a few. There was also a thriving community of CL researchers alreadyestablished in San Diego, including Dr. Jean Mark Gawron, also at SDSU.
