Michael's research interests have been primarily in natural language generation, paraphrasing and spoken language dialogue systems, though recently he has also been working on grammar induction, monolingual word alignment and answer matching in dialogue. Prior to joining the faculty here, Michael was a Research Fellow in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Before crossing the pond to Scotland, he worked for many years at CoGenTex, Inc., a small company dedicated to developing commercial natural language generation software, as well as advancing research in NLG. Before that, he obtained a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania.