Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick

Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. They lead the BergLab, focusing on natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and unsupervised methods for analyzing diverse data types, including historical documents, music, and early modern books. Their work bridges computational techniques with interdisciplinary domains such as music information retrieval, paleography, and cultural heritage analysis. Taylor has been awarded an NSF CAREER grant for research on language evolution via probabilistic models.

The BergLab develops tools like Klavier (music transcription), Ocular (historical document recognition), and Puck (constituency parsing). Taylor's research emphasizes deciphering hidden structures in human data, from handwritten texts to musical patterns. Their teaching includes courses on algorithms for NLP at CMU and UC Berkeley.

Taylor advises numerous PhD students, many of whom have contributed to impactful projects such as compositor attribution in Shakespeare's works, music separation algorithms, and climate text understanding benchmarks like ClimaBench. Their work is featured in top venues like ACL, NeurIPS, and ICML, with applications spanning from improving AI safety to enhancing cultural preservation efforts.