Orion Weller

I’m a third-year PhD student at the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University, advised by Benjamin Van Durme and Dawn Lawrie. I am broadly interested in natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval (IR), and machine learning (ML). My research is graciously supported by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

My current research is situated between the NLP and IR fields, where I work to improve how models find, understand, and generate information. Some representative examples of my work include evaluating and using instuctions in retrieval, analyzing LLM’s training data, improving LLM’s factuality/attribution, and using retrieval to improve RAG.

Previously I graduated with my Bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University in computer science and statistics, where I was advised by Kevin Seppi and Quinn Snell.

I’m currently interning with Samaya AI during the summer with Jack Hessel, Ashwin Paranjape, and Yuhao Zhang. In the past, I’ve spent time interning with many excellent mentors: at Semantic Scholar/AI2 working with Luca Soldaini, Kyle Lo, and Arman Cohan in 2023, at Apple AI/ML with Matthias Sperber in 2020 and 2021, and at AllenNLP/AI2 with Matt Gardner and Matthew Peters in 2020.

If you’re interested in getting in contact with me, please email me at {last_name}{first_name}@gmail.com.