Orion Weller

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I’m a second-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 and understand knowledge. Some examples include improving models for open-domain knowledge tasks where the data requires multiple steps of reasoning, where the data is noisy or out-of-domain, or improving model’s factuality and attribution.

I’m interning with the Semantic Scholar team of the Allen Institute for AI in Summer 2023, where I’m excited to work with Luca Soldaini and Kyle Lo.

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.

In the past, I’ve spent time interning with several great mentors: with Matthias Sperber at Apple AI/ML in summer 2020 and 2021 and with Matt Gardner and Matthew Peters at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in the first half of 2020.

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

news

Dec 2022 Two new preprints: Defending Against Poisoning Attacks in Open-Domain Question Answering and When Do Decompositions Help for Machine Reading?
Apr 2022 Our paper on “Pretrained Models for Multilingual Federated Learning” was accepted to NAACL 2022! Code avilable here.
Apr 2022 I’ve been awarded both the DoD NDSEG and the NSF GRFP! I’m grateful to my wonderful advisors past and present for their support!