Leila Zilles

About

My name is Leila Zilles (say: "LIE-luh ZILL-us") and I'm a second-year PhD student in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, advised by Luke Zettlemoyer. Broadly, my research interests lie in natural language processing and machine learning. Currently, I am working on ways to incorporate external semantic information into coreference resolution. I am generously supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

I received my undergraduate degree from Bryn Mawr College, where I majored in Computer Science and Russian. During my time there, I worked with Eric Eaton on active transfer learning for statistical machine translation between languages with sparse parallel corpora.

Publications

• Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Leila Zilles, Daniel S. Weld, and Luke Zettlemoyer. Joint Coreference Resolution and Named-Entity Linking with Multi-pass Sieves. In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2013.

Teaching

• Spring 2012: TA, Programming Paradigms: C and Unix Programming (Bryn Mawr College)
• Fall 2011, Spring 2012: Tutor, Quantitative Learning Center (Bryn Mawr College)
• Spring 2009/10, Fall 2010: TA, Intro to Computer Science (Bryn Mawr College)

Personal

I am the current lead singer in the CSE Band, in which we take songs you already know and improve them by replacing the lyrics with punny things related to CS and research.

I spend a lot of time thinking about intersectional feminism and how this relates to the lack of diversity in computer science and technology. Lindsey Bieda has a great list of resources on this issue for others who may be interested.