He received his Ph.D. in 1998 in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers from 1998 to 1999 and joined the faculty in 1999. From 2005 to 2006 he was a visiting fellow in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He serves on the editorial board of the journals Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence and just served as program co-chair for the 2007 North American Association for Computational Linguistics Human Language Technology Conference. His research is funded by the NSF.