Faculty Directory

Douglas Downey

Professor of Computer Science

Contact

2233 Tech Drive
Mudd Room 3111
Evanston, IL 60208-3109

847-491-3710Email Douglas Downey

Website

Doug Downey's Homepage

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Departments

Computer Science

Affiliations

Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence

Master of Science in Robotics Program

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Education

Ph.D. Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

M.S. Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

B.S./M.S. Computer Science, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH

Research Interests

Downey's research is focused on natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, with a particular interest in the automatic construction of useful knowledge bases from Web text. One goal is to develop techniques and prototypes that extend the state of the art in Web search. Another goal is to theoretically investigate and establish a formal basis for techniques that can learn from unstructured text alone, without hand-labeled data.

More generally, Downey works on ways to utilize human input more effectively in machine learning. Two directions in this effort involve selecting human input carefully (active learning) or utilizing it in concert with unlabeled data (semi-supervised learning).

Selected Publications

• Naik, Aakanksha; Kuehl, Bailey; Bransom, Erin; Downey, Doug; Hope, Tom, CARE, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (2024).
• Allaway, Emily; Hwang, Jena D.; Bhagavatula, Chandra; McKeown, Kathleen; Downey, Doug; Choi, Yejin, Penguins Don't Fly, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (2023).
• Saad-Falcon, Jon; Singh, Amanpreet; Soldaini, Luca; D’Arcy, Mike; Cohan, Arman; Downey, Doug, Embedding Recycling for Language Models, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (2023).
• Lee, Benjamin Charles Germain; Downey, Doug; Lo, Kyle; Weld, Daniel S., LIMEADE, ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (2023).
• Brodnik, Neal R.; Carton, Samuel; Muir, Caelin; Ghosh, Satanu; Downey, Doug; Echlin, McLean P.; Pollock, Tresa M.; Daly, Samantha, Perspective, Journal of Applied Mechanics, Transactions ASME (2023).
• Palani, Srishti; Naik, Aakanksha; Downey, Doug; Zhang, Amy X.; Bragg, Jonathan; Chang, Joseph Chee, Relatedly, Association for Computing Machinery (2023).
• Chang, Joseph Chee; Zhang, Amy X.; Bragg, Jonathan; Head, Andrew; Lo, Kyle; Downey, Doug; Weld, Daniel S., CiteSee, Association for Computing Machinery (2023).
• Marasovic, Ana; Beltagy, Iz; Downey, Doug; Peters, Matthew E., Few-Shot Self-Rationalization with Natural Language Prompts, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (2022).