Chris Callison-Burch

Last updated
Chris Callison-Burch
BornMay 1977
United Kingdom
Nationality British-American
Citizenship British, American
Alma mater University of Edinburgh (PhD)
Known for Machine translation, Paraphrase generation, Large language models
Awards
Scientific career
Fields Natural language processing, Artificial intelligence, Crowdsourcing
Institutions University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University, Allen Institute for AI
Thesis Paraphrasing and Translation  (2003)
Website https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ccb/

Chris Callison-Burch is a British-American computer scientist and professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), specialising in natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI), and crowdsourcing. [2] [3] [4] He is recognised for his contributions to machine translation, paraphrase generation, and the application of large language models (LLMs) to AI challenges, with over 200 publications cited more than 33,000 times. [3] [5] [6] Callison-Burch has influenced public policy on AI and copyright, testifying before the U.S. Congress in 2023 on generative AI’s implications. [2] [7] [8] He serves as the faculty director for Penn’s Online Master of Science in Engineering in AI programme. [4]

Contents

Early life and education

Callison-Burch was born in the United Kingdom and earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh in 2003, focusing on machine translation and paraphrasing techniques. [4] [5] [9] His doctoral research developed statistical methods for generating paraphrases in machine translation systems, laying the foundation for his later NLP work. [10] [11] Prior to his PhD, he studied at the University of Edinburgh, where he developed an interest in computational linguistics. [4] [9]

Career

After his PhD, Callison-Burch joined the Centre for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University as a research faculty member from 2003 to 2009, working on NLP projects, including crowdsourcing for translation tasks. [10] [12] [13] In 2010, he joined the University of Pennsylvania as an associate professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science and was promoted to full professor in 2018. [2] [4] [14]

At Penn, Callison-Burch teaches courses on AI and NLP, including CIS 530 (Machine Learning) and CIS 620 (Advanced Topics in NLP), which attract over 500 students annually. [2] [5] [15] He developed and directs Penn’s Online Master of Science in Engineering in AI programme, launched in 2023. [4] [14] [16] In 2024, he took a sabbatical at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), focusing on vision-language models. [17] [18] [19]

Callison-Burch has held visiting positions at Google Research and Microsoft Research, collaborating on LLM projects. [3] [20] He teaches AI and NLP courses on Coursera, reaching thousands of global learners. [21] [22]

Research

Callison-Burch’s research focuses on NLP, AI, and crowdsourcing, with significant contributions to machine translation, paraphrase generation, and LLMs for tasks like text simplification and bias detection. [3] [10] [23] His early work developed crowdsourcing methods for machine translation, leveraging non-expert annotators for paraphrase-based evaluation, influencing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk. [24] [25]

Recent projects include:

He has co-authored over 200 publications, featured at conferences like ACL, EMNLP, and CVPR. [3] [5] [25] [18]

Awards and recognition

Callison-Burch has received numerous awards:

He has received research funding from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Roblox, DARPA, IARPA, and NSF. [2] [42] [44] His h-index is 72, with over 33,000 citations. [3] [5] He served as programme chair for ACL 2015 and EMNLP 2017 and is a fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics. [3] [5] [25]

Public policy and testimony

On May 17, 2023, Callison-Burch testified before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet on AI and copyright law. [2] [7] His testimony emphasised generative AI’s role in creative industries and the need for balanced copyright frameworks. [7] He has appeared on Fox News, CNN, and Bloomberg to discuss AI’s societal impact. [45] [46] [47]

He contributes to AI ethics discussions, including workshops on AI’s effects on writing and creative professions. [48]

Personal life

Callison-Burch resides in Philadelphia and is active on social media, including YouTube and LinkedIn, sharing AI and NLP insights. [4] [49] He holds dual British-American citizenship. [4]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Chris Callison-Burch earns $50,000 Slone Research Fellowship". Magnolia Reporter - Magnolia, Arkansas News. 19 February 2014.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Chris Callison-Burch". University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Chris Callison-Burch - Google Scholar". Google Scholar. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Online Master of Science in Engineering in Artificial Intelligence". University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Chris Callison-Burch - ACL Anthology". ACL Anthology. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  6. ↑ "Chris Callison-Burch". www.cis.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2025-09-14.
  7. 1 2 3 "Testimony of Chris Callison-Burch Before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet" (PDF). U.S. House of Representatives. 2023-05-17. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  8. ↑ Kim, Rachel (2024-01-03). "AI and Copyright Law in 2023: Federal Government Activities". Copyright Alliance. Retrieved 2025-09-14.
  9. 1 2 "Chris Callison-Burch". www.cis.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2025-09-14.
  10. 1 2 3 4 Callison-Burch, Chris (2007). "Paraphrasing with Bilingual Parallel Corpora" (PDF). Proceedings of ACL 2007. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  11. ↑ "Improved Statistical Machine Translation Using Paraphrases - Chris Callison-Burch (University of Edinburgh)". Center for Language and Speech Processing. Retrieved 2025-09-14.
  12. ↑ "Chris Callison-Burch | ILST". web.sas.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2025-09-14.
  13. ↑ "Former Faculty". Center for Language and Speech Processing. Retrieved 2025-09-14.
  14. 1 2 "New Online AI Master's Program at Penn". Penn Today. 2023-04-20. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  15. ↑ "Chris Callison-Burch". callison-burch.github.io. Retrieved 2025-09-14.
  16. ↑ Huffman, Sarah (2024-04-30). "Penn Engineering rolls out an online master's degree in artificial intelligence". Technical.ly. Retrieved 2025-09-14.
  17. ↑ "Open source tool helps vision-language models 'see' more clearly". optics.org. Retrieved 2025-09-14.
  18. 1 2 "Chris Callison-Burch". callison-burch.github.io. Retrieved 2025-09-14.
  19. ↑ Deitke, Matt; Clark, Christopher; Lee, Sangho; Tripathi, Rohun; Yang, Yue; Park, Jae Sung; Salehi, Mohammadreza; Muennighoff, Niklas; Lo, Kyle (2024-12-05). "Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models". arXiv: 2409.17146 [cs.CV].
  20. ↑ "Meet Chris Callison-Burch, MSE-AI Online Program Director" . Retrieved 2025-09-14.
  21. ↑ "Chris Callison-Burch on Coursera". Coursera. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  22. ↑ "Chris Callison-Burch". www.cis.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2025-09-14.
  23. ↑ Wang, Jenny S.; Haider, Samar; Tohidi, Amir; Gupta, Anushkaa; Zhang, Yuxuan; Callison-Burch, Chris; Rothschild, David; Watts, Duncan J. (2025-04-28). "Media Bias Detector: Designing and Implementing a Tool for Real-Time Selection and Framing Bias Analysis in News Coverage". Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. pp. 1–27. arXiv: 2502.06009 . doi:10.1145/3706598.3713716. ISBN   979-8-4007-1394-1.
  24. ↑ Callison-Burch, Chris (2009). "Fast, Cheap, and Creative: Evaluating Translation Quality Using Amazon's Mechanical Turk" (PDF). Proceedings of EMNLP 2009. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  25. 1 2 3 Callison-Burch, Chris (2011). "Crowdsourcing Translation: Professional Quality from Non-Professionals" (PDF). Proceedings of ACL 2011. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  26. 1 2 "Molmo and PixMo: Open Weight Vision-Language Models". Allen Institute for AI. 2025-01-15. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  27. ↑ "Paper page - Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Multimodal Models". huggingface.co. 2024-09-26. Retrieved 2025-09-14.
  28. 1 2 Callison-Burch, Chris (2025). "Molmo: Open Weight Vision-Language Models". Proceedings of CVPR 2025. arXiv: 2409.17146 .
  29. ↑ Deitke, Matt; Clark, Christopher; Lee, Sangho; Tripathi, Rohun; Yang, Yue; Park, Jae Sung; Salehi, Mohammadreza; Muennighoff, Niklas; Lo, Kyle; Soldaini, Luca; Lu, Jiasen; Anderson, Taira; Bransom, Erin; Ehsani, Kiana; Ngo, Huong (2025). "Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models": 91–104.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  30. ↑ Lyu, Qing; Shridhar, Kumar; Malaviya, Chaitanya; Zhang, Li; Elazar, Yanai; Tandon, Niket; Apidianaki, Marianna; Sachan, Mrinmaya; Callison-Burch, Chris (2025-08-05). "Calibrating Large Language Models with Sample Consistency". Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI'25/IAAI'25/EAAI'25. 39 (18). AAAI Press: 19260–19268. doi:10.1609/aaai.v39i18.34120. ISBN   978-1-57735-897-8.
  31. ↑ Callison-Burch, Chris (2025). "Calibrating LLMs with Sample Consistency". Proceedings of NAACL 2025. arXiv: 2402.13904 .
  32. ↑ Name, Your. "Accepted Papers". NAACL-HLT 2025. Retrieved 2025-09-14.
  33. ↑ Wang, Jenny S; Haider, Samar; Tohidi, Amir; Gupta, Anushkaa; Zhang, Yuxuan; Callison-Burch, Chris; Rothschild, David; Watts, Duncan J (2025-04-25). "Media Bias Detector: Designing and Implementing a Tool for Real-Time Selection and Framing Bias Analysis in News Coverage". Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI '25. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 1–27. doi:10.1145/3706598.3713716. ISBN   979-8-4007-1394-1.
  34. ↑ Callison-Burch, Chris (2024). "Holodeck: Language-Guided 3D Environment Generation". Proceedings of CVPR 2024. arXiv: 2312.09067 .
  35. ↑ Yang, Yue; Sun, Fan-Yun; Weihs, Luca; VanderBilt, Eli; Herrasti, Alvaro; Han, Winson; Wu, Jiajun; Haber, Nick; Krishna, Ranjay; Liu, Lingjie; Callison-Burch, Chris; Yatskar, Mark; Kembhavi, Aniruddha; Clark, Christopher (2024). "Holodeck: Language Guided Generation of 3D Embodied AI Environments": 16227–16237.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  36. ↑ Callison-Burch, Chris (2025). "Media Bias Detection with Large Language Models". Proceedings of EMNLP 2025. arXiv: 2410.01171v1 .
  37. ↑ Li, Bryan; Luo, Fiona; Haider, Samar; Agashe, Adwait; Li, Tammy; Liu, Runqi; Miao, Muqing; Ramakrishnan, Shriya; Yuan, Yuan (2025-06-22). "Multilingual Retrieval Augmented Generation for Culturally-Sensitive Tasks: A Benchmark for Cross-lingual Robustness". arXiv: 2410.01171 [cs.CL].
  38. ↑ Callison-Burch, Chris (2024). "Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Bistable Images". Proceedings of CMCL 2024: 8–29. doi:10.18653/v1/2024.cmcl-1.2 . Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  39. ↑ Callison-Burch, Chris (2016). "So-Called Non-Subsective Adjectives". Proceedings of STARSEM 2016: 114–119. doi:10.18653/v1/S16-2014 . Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  40. ↑ Callison-Burch, Chris (2017). "Word Sense Filtering Improves Embedding-Based Lexical Substitution". Proceedings of SenseRep 2017: 110–119. doi:10.18653/v1/W17-1914 . Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  41. ↑ Callison-Burch, Chris (2018). "A Data-Driven Analysis of Workers' Earnings on Amazon Mechanical Turk". Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. pp. 1–14. doi:10.1145/3173574.3174023. ISBN   978-1-4503-5620-6 . Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  42. 1 2 "Google Faculty Research Awards 2011". Google Research. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  43. ↑ Callison-Burch, Chris; Koehn, Philipp; Osborne, Miles (June 2006). Moore, Robert C.; Bilmes, Jeff; Chu-Carroll, Jennifer; Sanderson, Mark (eds.). "Improved Statistical Machine Translation Using Paraphrases". Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference of the NAACL, Main Conference. New York City, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics: 17–24.
  44. 1 2 "Sloan Research Fellowships". Sloan Foundation. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  45. ↑ "AI in Academia: Chris Callison-Burch on Fox News". Fox News. 2023-07-10. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  46. ↑ "AI and the Future of Work". CNN. 2023-08-15. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  47. ↑ "AI Innovations in NLP". Bloomberg. 2023-09-01. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  48. ↑ Submittable. "Cleaver Magazine - CHRIS CALLISON-BURCH: What Writers Need to Learn about AI and Large Language Models PURCHASE RECORDING". cleavermagazine.submittable.com. Retrieved 2025-09-14.
  49. ↑ "Chris Callison-Burch LinkedIn Profile". LinkedIn. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
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