PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Jonathan Graehl

Jonathan Graehl is a natural language processing researcher whose 1997 paper Machine Transliteration, written with Kevin Knight, won the ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award in 2022. He studied computer engineering and computer science at the University of Southern California, then worked at USC's Information Sciences Institute from 2002 to 2011 on tree transducers and syntactic translation models. In 2011 he joined SDL Language Weaver, and in 2015 he presented the hyp hypergraph toolkit with Markus Dreyer. He is a research scientist at RWS Language Weaver, where he works on transformer models for machine translation, speech and NLP, and in September 2026 he posted a multilingual privacy-tagging model to arXiv.

Now at
RWS Language Weaver
Badges

Timeline

  1. 1994–1998

    Computer science at USC

    He studies for a B.S. in Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Southern California from 1994 to 1998.

  2. 1997

    Machine Transliteration at ACL

    In 1997, he and Kevin Knight present Machine Transliteration at the 35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Madrid. The paper builds a generative model of the transliteration process, taking Japanese katakana and English as its example.

  3. 2002–2011

    Research programmer at ISI

    From 2002 to 2011, he works as a research programmer at the USC Information Sciences Institute. In 2006, he is a coauthor of Scalable Inference and Training of Context-Rich Syntactic Translation Models, presented at ACL-COLING.

  4. 2004–2008

    Training tree transducers

    In 2004, he and Kevin Knight present Training Tree Transducers at HLT-NAACL. A journal paper with the same title, coauthored with Knight and Jonathan May, appears in Computational Linguistics in 2008.

  5. 2011–2014

    Joining SDL Language Weaver

    In 2011, he joins SDL Language Weaver as a senior research engineer. The move follows his years as a research programmer at the USC Information Sciences Institute, which end in 2011.

  6. 2015

    The hyp hypergraph toolkit

    In 2015, he and Markus Dreyer present hyp, a C++11 toolkit for representing, manipulating and optimizing weighted hypergraphs, at NAACL-HLT. Context-free Algorithms, his February 2015 arXiv paper, covers hypergraph reachability, shortest path and inside-outside pruning.

  7. 2022

    ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award

    In 2022, the ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award for 1997 papers goes to Machine Transliteration, which he wrote with Kevin Knight. The award recognizes papers for long-lasting impact on natural language processing and computational linguistics, and the winners are announced at ACL 2022.

  8. September 2026

    Privacy tagging at encoder speed

    In September 2026, he posts Strong Multilingual Privacy Tagging at Encoder Speed to arXiv, a multilingual named-entity tagger for privacy redaction built by fine-tuning XLM-R-large on text in 35 languages. It reaches 88.2 redaction F1 on human-annotated test sets in seven languages, ahead of GLiNER2 at 69.1 and Microsoft Presidio at 61.4. Since 2014, he is a research scientist at RWS Language Weaver, formerly SDL Research, working on transformer models for machine translation, speech and NLP.

Career

  1. Since 2014RWS Language WeaverResearch Scientist
  2. 2011–2014SDL Language WeaverSenior Research Engineer
  3. 2002–2011University of Southern CaliforniaResearch Programmer

Education

  1. 1998University of Southern CaliforniaB.S. in Computer Engineering and Computer Science

From the biography.

  1. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes University of Southern California. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  2. Universities had a net outflow of 2,068 moves in AI careersIncludes University of Southern California. Our estimates of career flows and median h-index across universities and companies in AI, including the role of joint appointments and earlier academic jobs.
  3. People shaping AI work at a median of 3 organizations over a career: 3 for university starters and institute and lab starters, versus 2 for company startersIncludes University of Southern California. Across 6,853 people shaping AI with a dated work role, we estimate a median of 3 parent organizations over a career (mean 3.6), comparing role groups, starting sectors and starting decades from the 1950s to 2020–2026.
  4. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes University of Southern California. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Jonathan Graehl — Curriculum Vitae cv.graehl.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Machine Transliteration - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Inside ACL 2022 Test of Time Papers Awards analyticsindiamag.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Training Tree Transducers - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. GitHub - sdl-research/hyp: hyp: hypergraphs toolkit github.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. [1502.02328] Context-free Algorithms arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Announcement of the 2022 ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award | ACL Member Portal aclweb.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. [2609.38630] Strong Multilingual Privacy Tagging at Encoder Speed arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. graehl (Jonathan Graehl) · GitHub github.com. Checked 21 October 2026.