Michael's research interests have been primarily in natural language generation, paraphrasing and spoken language dialogue systems. 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.