About Me

My name is Stephen Merity, though I'm more commonly referred to as Smerity. For more details you can view my resume or contact me in person at smerity@smerity.com.

Searching for Smerity will find most places I've inhabited online. If you're interested, almost all my Facebook communications are public as it allows people to discover a small amount of who I am, and reminds me that even private things on Facebook aren't private.

Stephen Merity's Facebook profile

Smerity @ Google+    Smerity @ Github    View Stephen Merity's profile on LinkedIn

University & Work

I've recently completed the Bachelor of Information Technology at the University of Sydney, receiving First Class Honours and University Medal. I've recently started working full time at Freelancer.com, where I originally began as an intern working on data mining and interaction mechanics. In the past, I've worked at Google as an intern on Google AppEngine.

Publications

Integrated Tagging and Pruning via Shift-Reduce CCG Parsing (2011) [pdf][bib]
Stephen Merity (supervisor: Dr James R. Curran)
Honours Thesis, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Best Student Presentation: Frontier Pruning for Shift-Reduce CCG Parsing (2011) [pdf][bib][presentation]
Stephen Merity and James R. Curran
Proceedings of the 2011 Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop, ALTA 2011

Accurate Argumentative Zoning with Maximum Entropy models (2009) [pdf][bib]
Stephen Merity, Tara Murphy and James R. Curran
Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Text and Citation Analysis for Scholarly Digital Libraries, ACL-IJCNLP 2009, pages 19-26

Programming

In specific areas of programming, I have a soft spot for Natural Language Processing - a special thanks to Dr James R. Curran for introducing it to me. I've also spent a deal of time play with a wide range of programming subtopics, including such things as computer graphics, machine learning and optimization techniques such as linear programming.

NCSS

A true "about me" would have to mention NCSS. NCSS is the National Computer Science School, a summer school run at the University of Sydney involving talented high school students from all over Australia. Having had the privilege of going there five times (first in 2007 as a student, then in 2008 as a returning student and finally as a tutor in 2009, 2010 and 2011) I can honestly say it was one of the most delightful experiences of my entire life. If you're a student or know someone that general age, sign up to NCSS or into NCSS Challenge!