Derrick Higgins

I've come to the realization that I am no longer capable of updating a web page more than once a year, so I'm restricting the personal information here to those things which are relatively static:

• I have 1 brilliant, beautiful wife and 2 brilliant, beautiful kids.
• I'm a computational linguist at ETS in Princeton, NJ. So I devise ways of processing test responses such as essays and snippets of speech automatically. This might include automatic scoring, providing feedback about how the response might be improved, and weeding out responses that look suspicious.  Here is a list of some of my recent papers.
  
• I am now living in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, in a house which will never be truly "finished".  With every little project that I complete, the house becomes slightly more livable, and I become marginally less likely to burn the thing down and start over.
  
• I play chess, sometimes pretty well, sometimes frustratingly poorly, and often both during the course of a single game.