Photo of Brian DuSell

Brian DuSell

/ˈbɹaɪən duˈsɛl/
杜亦然
デュセル・ブライアン

I am a computer science researcher interested in natural language processing, neural networks, AI, syntax, machine translation, and formal language theory. I earned my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at the University of Notre Dame and, after spending some time in industry, later returned to complete my PhD with the brilliant David Chiang. My thesis was about learning syntactic patterns (especially ambiguous ones) by incorporating nondeterministic pushdown automata into neural networks.

Publications

  • Nondeterministic Stacks in Neural Networks
    Brian DuSell
    PhD Dissertation (2023)
    arXiv CurateND
    @phdthesis{dusell-2023-nondeterministic,
        title = "Nondeterministic Stacks in Neural Networks",
        author = "DuSell, Brian",
        school = "University of Notre Dame",
        year = "2023",
        month = apr,
        url = "https://curate.nd.edu/show/jh343r10k4d",
        doi = "10.7274/jh343r10k4d"
    }
  • The Surprising Computational Power of Nondeterministic Stack RNNs
    Brian DuSell and David Chiang
    ICLR 2023
    code arXiv OpenReview
    @inproceedings{dusell-chiang-2023-surprising,
        title = "The Surprising Computational Power of Nondeterministic Stack {RNN}s",
        author = "DuSell, Brian and Chiang, David",
        booktitle = "Proc. ICLR",
        year = "2023",
        month = may,
        address = "Kigali, Rwanda",
        url = "https://openreview.net/pdf?id=o58JtGDs6y"
    }
  • Algorithms for Weighted Pushdown Automata
    Alexandra Butoi, Brian DuSell, Tim Vieira, Ryan Cotterell, and David Chiang
    EMNLP 2022
    code arXiv ACL
    @inproceedings{butoi-etal-2022-algorithms,
        title = "Algorithms for Weighted Pushdown Automata",
        author = "Butoi, Alexandra and DuSell, Brian and Vieira, Tim and Cotterell, Ryan and Chiang, David",
        booktitle = "Proc. EMNLP",
        year = "2022",
        month = dec,
        address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
        publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
        url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.656.pdf"
    }
  • Learning Hierarchical Structures with Differentiable Nondeterministic Stacks
    Brian DuSell and David Chiang
    ICLR 2022 🏆 Spotlight paper!
    code arXiv OpenReview
    @inproceedings{dusell-chiang-2022-learning,
        title = "Learning Hierarchical Structures with Differentiable Nondeterministic Stacks",
        author = "DuSell, Brian and Chiang, David",
        booktitle = "Proc. ICLR",
        year = "2022",
        month = apr,
        address = "Online",
        url = "https://openreview.net/pdf?id=5LXw\_QplBiF"
    }
  • Learning Context-Free Languages with Nondeterministic Stack RNNs
    Brian DuSell and David Chiang
    CoNLL 2020
    code arXiv ACL
    @inproceedings{dusell-chiang-2020-learning,
        title = "Learning Context-Free Languages with Nondeterministic Stack {RNN}s",
        author = "DuSell, Brian and Chiang, David",
        booktitle = "Proc. CoNLL",
        pages = "507--519",
        year = "2020",
        month = nov,
        address = "Online",
        publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
        url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.conll-1.41.pdf",
        doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.conll-1.41"
    }
  • Efficiency through Auto-Sizing: Notre Dame NLP's Submission to the WNGT 2019 Efficiency Task
    Kenton Murray, Brian DuSell, and David Chiang
    Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation 2019
    arXiv ACL
    @inproceedings{murray-etal-2019-efficiency,
        title = "Efficiency through Auto-Sizing: {N}otre {D}ame {NLP}{'}s Submission to the {WNGT} 2019 Efficiency Task",
        author = "Murray, Kenton and DuSell, Brian and Chiang, David",
        booktitle = "Proc. Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation",
        pages = "297--301",
        year = "2019",
        month = nov,
        address = "Hong Kong",
        publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
        url = "https://aclanthology.org/D19-5634.pdf",
        doi = "10.18653/v1/D19-5634"
    }
  • News

    Experience

    • University of Notre Dame logo

      University of Notre Dame

      2016-2023
      M.S. and Ph.D., Computer Science
      Dissertation: Nondeterministic Stacks in Neural Networks
      Advisor: David Chiang
    • AWS logo

      Applied Scientist Intern

      Jun-Sep 2021
      Amazon Web Services
      Team: Amazon Translate
    • AWS logo

      Applied Scientist Intern

      Jun-Sep 2020
      Amazon Web Services
      Team: Amazon Translate
    • Oak Financial Software Corp. logo

      Software Developer

      2014-2016
      Oak Financial Software Corp.
    • NetApp logo

      Member of Technical Staff

      2013-2014
      NetApp
      Data Protection Group
    • University of Notre Dame logo

      University of Notre Dame

      2009-2013
      B.S. in Computer Science, magna cum laude
    • Wolverine logo

      Software Engineering Intern

      May-Aug 2012
      Wolverine Trading

    Software

    • Nondeterministic Stack RNN

      PyTorch implementation of our Nondeterministic Stack RNN model, as well as other Stack RNN models.

    • Semiring Einsum

      Python package for efficiently performing einsum operations in different semirings in PyTorch.

    • Jishosen

      Online Japanese-English dictionary.

    See more on my GitHub page.

    Hey, you scrolled down this far!

    Fun fact: my grandfather, D. Lee DuSell, is an artist and sculptor, and you can check out his work on his website, made by yours truly.