Eric Brill is a computer scientist specializing in natural language processing.[1] He created the Brill tagger, a supervised part of speech tagger.[2] Another research paper of Brill introduced a machine learning technique now known as transformation-based learning.[3]
Brill earned a BA in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1987 and a MS in Computer Science from UT Austin in 1989. In 1994, he completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.[4] He was an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University from 1994 to 1999.[5] In 1999, he left JHU for Microsoft Research,[6] he developed a system called "Ask MSR" that answered search engine queries written as questions in English,[7] and was quoted in 2004 as predicting the shift of Google's web-page based search to information based search.[8] In 2009 he moved to eBay to head their research laboratories.[9]