Waleed Ammar, a Ph.D. student in the Language Technologies Institute, is one of two Carnegie Mellon University students and one of just 15 graduate students from across North America chosen as 2015 Google Ph.D. Fellows.

Justin Meza, a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, joins Ammar in this group of students that Google has identified as doing exceptional work on computer science and related disciplines. The two-year fellowship includes tuition, fees and a yearly stipend.

Ammar, who is advised by LTI's Noah Smith and Chris Dyer, will receive the Google U.S./Canada Fellowship in Natural Language Processing. His research includes work on conditional random field autoencoders, a family of models that uses unlabeled data for learning structured predictors in natural language processing.

"This is useful in situations where labeled data are scarce in the domain or language of interest," Ammar said. "For example, I'm currently applying this model to develop syntactic parsers for low-resource languages."

Before coming to CMU, Ammar worked for Microsoft Research in the fields of natural language processing, information retrieval and data mining. He received his bachelor's degree in computer systems and engineering at Alexandria University in 2007.