Kenji Sagae

Kenji Sagae

Professor and Chair
UC Davis

I am a Professor at the University of California, Davis, where I currently serve as chair of the Department of Linguistics. I am additionally affiliated with the Computer Science graduate program, the Cognitive Science program, and the Computational Social Science designated emphasis.

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Research Interests

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Automatic analysis of child language
  • Computational models of syntax
  • Language Technology applications

Brief Bio

University of California, Davis (2016-present)

I am chair of the Department of Linguistics, with additional affiliations with Cognitive Science and Computer Science. I also run the Computational Linguistics Laboratory. A small sample of topics in our recent projects include toxicity and bias in language models, computational models of syntax, automatic measurement of child language development, and language technology in healthcare.

KITT.AI (2015-2016)

I was a co-founder of KITT.AI, a startup acquired by Baidu.

University of Southern California (2008-2015)

Until October of 2015 I was a Research Assistant Professor at the USC Computer Science Department, and a Research Scientist and Project Leader at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. I taught CSCI 544 Applied Natural Language Processing, and supervised a research group on computational models of natural language structure consisting of a few students and a senior research associate.

University of Tokyo (2006-2008)

Before joining USC I was a member of Tsujii Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. At Tsujii Lab, I worked on combining discriminative dependency parsing with HPSG, and on applying syntactic parsing in bioinformatics.

Carnegie Mellon University (PhD, 2006)

I got my PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006. My thesis advisors were Alon Lavie (LTI) and Brian MacWhinney (Psychology). The other members of my thesis committee were Lori Levin (LTI), Jaime Carbonell (LTI), and John Carroll (University of Sussex, Department of Informatics). My research at CMU involved data-driven syntactic parsing and analysis of the development of syntax in child language.