Eric Brill is a computer scientist specializing in natural language processing.[1] He created the Brill tagger, a supervised part of speech tagger.[2] Another research paper by Brill introduced a machine learning technique now known as transformation-based learning.[3] His educational background includes a B.Sc in mathematics, an MS in Computer Science, and a Ph.D., with affiliations including the University of Chicago, UT Austin, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Biography
Brill earned a BA in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1987 and an MS in Computer Science from UT Austin in 1989. In 1994, he completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.[4] He was an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University from 1994 to 1999.[5] In 1999, he left JHU for Microsoft Research, where he developed a system called "Ask MSR" that answered search engine queries written as questions in English, and was quoted in 2004 as predicting the shift of Google's web-page based search to information based search.[8,6,7] In 2009, he moved to eBay to head their research laboratories.[9]