Collin F. Baker

Biography

Collin F. Baker, PhD, is a Senior Fellow and Research Mentor at ICSI. His research interests focus on artificial intelligence and include computational lexical semantics, frame semantics, and construction grammar.

Dr. Baker has been a member of the FrameNet project team since its inception in 1997 and has been the project manager for FrameNet since 2000. He also managed ICSI’s MetaNet project. For these projects, he supervises day-to-day operation, helps with data structures and software design, and writes technical reports. He has also published numerous papers about FrameNet as a semantically rich knowledge base from both linguistic and computational perspectives. His recent activities include work on the redesign of the Framenet public website and lecturing on Frame Semantics at Keio University. Dr. Baker has also been active in encouraging cooperation among FrameNet-like projects for other languages in many countries, including Brazil, Japan, China, and Germany. (See the FrameNet website for more information.)

In 2012, Dr. Baker received the Antonio Zampolli Prize from the European Language Resources Association jointly with FrameNet Founder Charles J. Fillmore. In 2013, he received a Google Research Award for a project entitled “Scaling Up FrameNet for NLP.” He has also served as a reviewer for the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering and for journals such as Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation, Cognitive Linguistics, Constructions and Frames, and Cognitive Science. Dr. Baker received his PhD in linguistics from UC Berkeley.

Publications

Selected Honors & Awards

• Antonio Zampolli Prize from the European Language Resources Association (jointly with FrameNet Founder Charles J. Fillmore) (2012)
• Google Research Award for project entitled “Scaling Up FrameNet for NLP” (2013)

Areas of Expertise

• Machine Learning (Supervised, Unsupervised, Reinforcement Learning)
• Knowledge Representation and Automated Reasoning
• Human-AI Collaboration and Teaming
• Machine Translation and Multilingual Language Models
• Text Analytics: Sentiment Analysis, Summarization, Topic Modeling
• Low-Resource, Cross-Lingual, and Inclusive NLP
• Accessibility, Inclusive Design, and Assistive Technologies
• Open Data, FAIR Data Principles, and Research Transparency
• Collaborative Platforms, Citizen Science, and Crowdsourcing
• Open Licensing, Governance, and Sustainability of Projects

ICSI Activity