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Michael Collins

Research scientist, Google

Michael Collins works on natural language processing and machine learning; Google Research's profile describes a focus on statistical parsing, structured prediction, and applications such as machine translation, dialog systems, and speech recognition, and notes that Collins is a fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Collins's Columbia homepage, which lists teaching through Spring 2020, says Collins was a researcher at AT&T Labs-Research from 1999 to 2002 and an assistant and then associate professor at MIT from 2003 to 2010, joined Columbia University in January 2011, and is also a research scientist at Google. Collins is listed with Google DeepMind on InfAlign, an ICML 2025 paper on inference-aware language model alignment, and is a co-author of Measuring Attribution in Natural Language Generation Models, which presents the Attributable to Identified Sources (AIS) evaluation framework. Collins also publishes lecture notes on statistical NLP topics on the Columbia homepage.1234

At a glance

Current role
Research scientist
Company
Google
Education
Columbia, MIT, Penn
Work listed
2
Honors
10
Sources cited
4
Profile reviewed

Career

Michael Collins completed a PhD in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania in December 1998. Collins was then a researcher at AT&T Labs-Research from January 1999 to November 2002 and an assistant and then associate professor at MIT from January 2003 to December 2010.1

Collins joined Columbia University in January 2011, where the homepage gives the title Vikram S. Pandit Professor of Computer Science, and says Collins is also a research scientist at Google. Google Research's profile describes Collins's research on statistical parsing, structured prediction and applications including machine translation, dialog systems and speech recognition.12

Research and teaching

Collins's papers have received best paper awards at EMNLP, UAI and CoNLL, and a test of time award at NAACL 2018. More recent work with Google colleagues includes the Attributable to Identified Sources (AIS) framework for judging whether generated text is supported by sources, and InfAlign, a method for aligning language models with the inference-time procedure in mind.1243

At Columbia, Collins taught the Natural Language Processing course COMS W4705, most recently listed for Spring 2020. In Spring 2013 Collins taught an online course on natural language processing on Coursera, and the notes for that class are posted on the Columbia homepage.1

Work and contributions

  • Measuring Attribution in Natural Language Generation Models (AIS) Published research

    Co-author of the paper that defines the Attributable to Identified Sources (AIS) framework and a two-stage annotation pipeline for judging whether generated text is supported by underlying sources; the Google Research profile lists the work among Collins's publications.42

  • Statistical NLP lecture notes Published research

    Publishes notes on language models, hidden Markov models, PCFGs, IBM translation models, log-linear models, and the EM algorithm, and taught an online natural language processing course on Coursera in Spring 2013.1

Timeline

  1. Completed a PhD in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania.1
  2. Joined AT&T Labs-Research as a researcher.1
  3. Joined the MIT faculty as an assistant/associate professor.1
  4. Joined Columbia University as a faculty member.1
  5. Taught an online course on natural language processing on Coursera.1
  6. Co-authored the paper introducing the Attributable to Identified Sources (AIS) evaluation framework.4
  7. Co-authored InfAlign, a paper on inference-aware alignment of language models.3

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

Honors and recognition

  • NSF CAREER Award · U.S. National Science Foundation12
  • Sloan Research Fellowship · Alfred P. Sloan Foundation12
  • ACL Fellow · Association for Computational Linguistics12
  • Best Paper Award, EMNLP 2002 · Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 200212
  • Best Paper Award, EMNLP 2004 · Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 200412
  • Best Paper Award, UAI 2004 · Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, 200412
  • Best Paper Award, UAI 2005 · Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, 200512
  • Best Paper Award, CoNLL 2008 · Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, 200812
  • Best Paper Award, EMNLP 2010 · Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 201012
  • Test of Time Award, NAACL 2018 · North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 20181

Where they work

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References

4 sources · profile reviewed Oct 21, 2026 · data updated Oct 21, 2026

  1. Michael Collins — Columbia CS homepage (affiliations and bio)Michael Collins (Columbia University) · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  2. Michael Collins — Google Research people profileGoogle Research · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  3. InfAlign: Inference-aware language model alignment (arXiv 2412.19792, ICML 2025)arXiv · Paper · published Dec 27, 2024 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  4. Measuring Attribution in Natural Language Generation Models (arXiv 2112.12870)arXiv · Paper · published Dec 23, 2021 · accessed Oct 21, 2026