Please help me in improving my CMU MS in Language Technologies essay
There is one attitude, one phrase that I apply to everything I do:
Yes, I can.
This was what I told myself as I wore out the surface of the treadmill losing fifty pounds, and this was what I repeated as I struggled with convolutional neural networks. The fact that I could create a system and train it felt like a revelation. I have spent three years of my career on machine learning, and my desire to pursue it further is one of the primary motivations that drives me to go through the rigors of a master's degree.
We are slowly getting closer to creating a machine that can pass the Turing test. For a machine to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to a human, it must understand humans and the way they interact. The language that humans speak and write is the most expressive means of communication we have. If we are successfully able to teach a machine to understand the natural language of humans in both letter and spirit, we would be creating a revolution. After I graduate, I intend to contribute toward solving some of the most pressing problems in the field of machine learning and natural language processing, and ultimately transform my ideas into a business of my own.
My first project with machine learning went through recommender systems. I used an algorithm based on cosine similarity to compute the distance between two nodes in a semantic graph, and it taught me the importance of how features can be used to make predictions. The following semester, I developed a collaborative-filtering-based recommender system and got right into regression analysis, with a goal of predicting the rating a user might give to a song based on their profile. This project edified me about the limitations of classifiers and how approaches like ensemble learners excel. To further my knowledge, I also took up electives in machine learning throughout my undergraduate study. I needed a deeper understanding dimensionality reduction and spent my last semester working on a thesis project on feature extraction.
I did not limit myself to only academics. In addition to that, I also held the position of student placement coordinator, where some of my responsibilities included managing job placements of around 450 students by coordinating with more than 90 companies worldwide. I was also a member of the college literary club, in which I organized several popular events. Even though on a few occasions these made my academic life more difficult, I do not regret them. They have taught me how to manage my time as skillfully as possible.
In my penultimate semester, XXX offered me the position of application developer, where I was a part of a 24-month Global Graduate Program whose aim was to create the technological leaders of the future. As an application developer, I got the opportunity to work in a department called XXX Research, which publishes thousands of financial text publications for clients, and this enormous amount of data was an excellent resource for solving many classic problems in machine learning.
In XXX Research, while I was trying to understand the intricacies of publishing financial research, I observed that my team was using Apache Lucene's text matching capabilities to perform named entity recognition (NER). While Lucene is a fast text indexing solution, it lacks the capabilities of modern NER systems. I hence developed a conditional-random-field (CRF) based NER system that could recognize 20,000 different organizations.
I also worked with Mr. XXX and drew upon his experience as a researcher at Cornell University, to solve a multi-label classification problem on a large text dataset. After a few months, I had the opportunity to work with XXX Innovation Lab based in Tel Aviv, on a global R&D project to develop a question answering system to answer text questions entered by users based on the publications we produce. I contributed toward the development of a knowledge-based question answering system, where I helped in converting thousands of XXX Research publications into RDF using semantic ontology. For this project, I evaluated and worked with multiple vendors, including IBM's Watson, Thomson Reuters Open Calais, Lymba and Amenity's VIP. I dug deep into their products and came to understand how they solve major problems like NER, entity disambiguation, co-reference resolution, conversion of text to an RDF graph, and many more. Here, I got an understanding of how large-scale machine-learning-based software solutions are created, and how can we model them to widely-varying use cases. Presently, I am working on using an information-retrieval-based approach to find answers to Factoid questions. I have also mentored two new joiners in my team and helped them to get on-boarded to their projects.
Continuing my current trajectory, some of the topics that are of greatest interest for graduate studies are deep learning for NLP, finding optimal feature selection and reduction strategy for problems, building scalable machine learning solutions and combining linked open data principles with NLP. Besides these areas, there are many problems that have caught my attention, and one of the most intriguing is robo-writing, where we use machine learning to generate human-like written text. XXX was particularly interested in using this approach to convert SEC filings into text articles. I was deeply inspired by Andrej Karpathy's char-RNN, where he uses a multi-layer recurrent neural network that learns to predict the next character in a sequence. Considering the revolution this will create in the publishing industry, I want to contribute toward an efficient solution to this problem. Word embedding in NLP also fascinates me, and I would like to work with one of its novel extensions, namely Thought Vectors.
I am determined to gain a strong background in computer science and plan to use it to make a dent in the vast field of machine learning and natural language processing, by contributing to academic research. I understand Prof Jaime Carbonell has done significant work in the field of NLP. His work history and current pursuits have a strong convergence with my interests, and I would like to request that you consider me as a graduate research assistant under his direction. I also found Prof Taylor Berg's work, especially in Question Answering systems, highly inspiring.
To excel as a graduate student and in my later career, I possess strong problem-solving skills along with the ability to understand new ideas and implement them using the programming skills I have gained working in the industry. I plan to use the experience I gained as a Student Placement Coordinator to forge strong industry partnerships in the form of research projects and placement opportunities. I am confident that the time I spent mentoring others in college and work, would help me make a good teaching assistant. I believe the resonance of my interests and previous work with that of Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University will help me to enrich my knowledge and make a meaningful contribution to my field.
I would like to conclude my thoughts with a timeless creed that sums up the spirit of my life: Yes, I can.
Thank you very much for your time and attention.
Holt Educational Consultant - / 14,835 
4783 Vijender , the statement of purpose must be more professional and less personal in presentation. Your current presentation is not focused on presenting your professional qualifications for the course because you have integrated personal points of view about unrelated information into the paper. It would be best if you focus on selling yourself professionally alone in this paper because, that is the whole point if a statement of purpose.
The first paragraph must clearly indicate what plans you have for your future in this field. You did not really represent a solid reason for your desire to pursue continued education in this field. The primary motivation needs to be more than just academic in reason, it has to have a forward thinking presentation as to how such studies will help you to contribute to the development of AI Language in the future. An intention is acceptable. An intention with a course of action presented in terms of professional and academic growth with the intention becoming a reality at the end of all the academic training would be even better. Make that clear in a dedicated paragraph somewhere in the essay.
You have presented numerous projects in this essay, but not a single one shows your potential to create a breakthrough in the field. You should present your most successful projects by presenting not only what you learned from the experience, but also, how the project succeeded in doing something remarkable in the end. Reviewers will only be impressed by these projects, at this level of study, if you can prove that these have useful real world applications and that it won you some sort of recognition from your peers, professors, or mentor that you collaborated with on the project. That makes the undertaking noteworthy in the eyes of the reviewer. As a masters degree student, the purpose should be supported by real world accomplishments in the related fields. It should not merely be a listing of the classes that were of interest to you or that you took because of your interest in the field. If you did not graduate with honors and recognition in this area from your college studies, then you were merely another student who graduated. Running down the list of classes you took will not accomplish much.
Your extra curricular activities should be placed in the personal statement, so the student placement coordinator paragraph should be removed. This essay is solely about proving that your purpose is supported by your previous training and work experience.
The internship as an application developer should be further enhanced as part of your professional experience, provided the university accepts internships as work hours in a professional setting. What did you accomplish during that time? Don't focus on the description of the company, focus on selling the reviewer on the idea that you were a vital member of the internship pool at that time. Accomplishments are vital to the application.
The person you worked with from Cornell, is he giving you a recommendation letter? It is not advisable to mention names in a statement of purpose as part of your work presentation if he isn't going to do that. Normally, the reviewer will want to verify the information with the professor so, unless he specifically gave you permission to use his name, discuss the work experience only and what was accomplished during that time.
There are 2 vital components missing from your statement of purpose. The first, is your explanation as to why you chose this university to study in. Programs, mentor opportunities, or internship / work exposure are vital to this choice and must be discussed in detail. Second, what is the plan for after you graduate? How will the masters degree from the university make it easier for you to achieve these goals?
These observations, when applied to your revised essay will make it stronger, more informative, and allow you to present yourself in the strongest light to the reviewer.
