Fall 2018 - PhD CS (NLP) - GPA:91/100 - GRE:333 - TOEFL:117

Hi everyone!

I'm seeking admission to a Ph.D program in Computer Science. My area of interest lies at the intersection of Stats, CS and Linguistics, with a hint of AI (neural networks). My master's program has been research-centric with the general area being Natural Language Processing (NLP) usng machine learning and information retreival techniques.

Academia:

Programs:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science - First Class (61/100)
• Master's Degree in Computer Science (Research track) - A+ (91/100) - Thesis related to Neural Linguistic Style Transfer (Masters program funded by my research assistantship position)
  

All of my masters' program coursework has been related to scaling storage & processing systems, distributed systems & protocols and machine learning.

Publications: (first author on both papers)

• Conference workshop paper related to financial sentiment analysis on news text, in the proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics conference (ACL 2017)
• Conference workshop paper related to affect analysis using conventional boosting and neural networks on text, in the proceedings of the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing conference (EMNLP 2017) - Ranked 4th best for this workshop
  

Standardized Test Scores:

• GRE: 333 (Q: 168, V: 165, AWA: 5)
• TOEFL: 117 (R:30, L:30, S:27, W:30) - Won't be needing this as I'll be completing my masters in North America
  

Teaching assistant for 3 undergrad courses: Functional programming, Object-oriented programming and Data Structures & Data Management.

Industry:

• 2.5 years as a software engineer in an IT automation project for a large US client
• 1 year as a software engineer in a product based digital marketing firm
• 3 months as research scientist for a digital marketing firm, working on NLP
• 3 months as SDE intern for a large e-commerce firm, working on Stat. ML personalization systems
  

I have an active Github profile with a few side-projects that focus on distributed systems and NLP.

Objective:
I have a reasonably good idea about the specific area of research I want to focus on, during my PhD, and it is closely related to neural style transfer for natural language generation systems.

Shortlist:

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (CSAIL NLP group) - Regina Barzilay
• Stanford University (NLP group) - Christopher Manning / Dan Jurafsky
• Carnegie Mellon University (LTI NLP group) - Eric Nyberg
• University of British Columbia (NLP group) - Giuseppe Carenini
• University of Washington (NLP group) - Noah Smith
  

I'd appreciate any comments/suggestions from seniors who might already be working in these areas, or even general advice.

My publication record isn't great, and my undergraduate grades aren't good either. The reason all of the places on my list are very ambitious is because these seem to be the only academic groups that have publications in my sub-area. I can manage good recommendations from my advisor and thesis readers.

Thank you for reading!