Professional interests:
"I work in natural language processing, or computational linguistics. My research deals specifically with annotating text with the role or function that each phrase plays in a sentence. Soon, I hope to begin investigating applications in machine translation. I also do research in formal semantics—composing word meanings into sentence meanings."

Teaching interests:
Natural language processing, artificial intelligence, programming languages, graphics

Recent Scholarly Achievements
Publications:
"Handling noisy training and testing data." Proceedings of the 7th conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Philadelphia, pp. 111-116, 2002.

"Unsupervised learning of multi-word verbs." Co-authored with Mark Johnson. ACL Workshop on Collocation, Toulouse, France, pp. 54-60, 2001.
 
"Assigning Function Tags to Parsed Text." Co-authored with Eugene Charniak. Proceedings of the 1st Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Seattle, Washington, pp. 234-240, 2000.
 
"Automatic Compensation for Parser Figure-of-Merit Flaws." Co-authored with Eugene Charniak. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, College Park, Maryland, pp. 513--518, 1999.

Contact
309-341-7956
dblaheta@knox.edu 

What Students Say
"Don isn't interested in a mere transfer of knowledge when he teaches; he wants to share his passion for the subject. Each time he walks into the classroom, you can tell that he's going to enjoy today's lesson and, even more so, helping his students put this new information to work. Don Blaheta is not afraid to challenge his students because he always seems to know just the right questions to ask to help guide them in the right direction without handing them the answer; making each discovery that much more satisfying—for both Don and his students."
—Doug Porter '05, Psychology and Theatre Major