Michael J. Collins (born 4 March 1970) is a researcher in the field of computational linguistics.
His research interests are in natural language processing as well as machine learning and he has made important contributions in statistical parsing and in statistical machine learning. One notable contribution is a state-of-the-art parser for the Penn Wall Street Journal corpus.
His research covers a wide range of topics such as parse re-ranking, tree kernels, semi-supervised learning, machine translation and exponentiated gradient algorithms with a general focus on discriminative models and structured prediction.
Collins worked as a researcher at AT&T Labs between January 1999 and November 2002, and later held the positions of assistant and associate professor at M.I.T. Since January 2011, he has been a professor at Columbia University.
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