Silviu Cucerzan

About

I am a researcher in the MSR Redmond lab and the manager of the Knowledge and Reasoning in Language (opens in new tab) group (formerly known as KTX), which is part of the Language, Learning, Audio, and Privacy organization. I joined KTX in spring 2020 after a four-year double rotation in Microsoft product groups. During the rotation, I had the privilege to lead the NLP team in Bing‘s Knowledge Graph group (Satori) for 3½ years and to manage a small NLP team in the FUSE Labs for ½ year.

I joined Microsoft (opens in new tab) in 2003, after completing my Ph.D. work at the Johns Hopkins University (opens in new tab), where I was a member of the Center for Speech and Language Processing (opens in new tab). I also received a M.S.E. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins, as well as an M.Sc. and a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science from University of Bucharest (opens in new tab). Prior to coming to the United States (opens in new tab), I held a junior faculty position in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (opens in new tab) at University of Bucharest.

Research Interests

Information Extraction from Large Text Collections
Natural Language Processing
Knowledge Representation
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning

Influential Technologies Developed

Contextual Spelling Correction (How do you spell Levenshtein? (opens in new tab))
Query Suggestion and Advertisement Smart Matching
Information-centric Browsing and Search (TechFest 2007 (opens in new tab)/TechFair 2007 (opens in new tab))
Entity Linking (NEMO)
Fact Extraction from Web text and News
Vandalism Detection in Collaboratively-built Collections
InstaFact (Hackathon 2016 winner (opens in new tab) and Data Types in Excel (opens in new tab))

Favorite quote
Samuel Goldwyn: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

Personal interests
Wildlife photography (opens in new tab)
Lego (opens in new tab)
Classical music
Jazz
Hiking
Board games
Writing