Contacting Noah Smith

I spend a lot of time reading and writing email. I wish I had more time for advising my students, learning new things, thinking about my research, and writing papers. Every message I take the time to read chips away at that time; please respect this fact when writing to me.

(If you’re not sure how to email, or you’re finding that emailing professors is not getting you the results you want, consider reading this article on how to email or these tips.)

The most common question I get in email is whether I am taking Ph.D. students in the next cycle. I do take Ph.D. students most years (and the UW NLP group takes Ph.D. students every year). In 2025 I do not expect to take any new Ph.D. students, because I had an unusually successful recruiting cycle in 2024.

Here is a quick, imperfect guide to emailing me.

Please email me if:

• you have specific technical questions about my research (it’s always good to CC my coauthors in case they can answer a question faster or better than I can)
• you’re interested in a postdoc and might want to be on my list of people I will notify if I have an opening (please note: at this time, I don’t have any open positions, but updates will be posted here)
• you are attending a conference I might be attending (most years I go to ACL, EMNLP, NAACL if it’s being held, ISMIR, and one or two others in machine learning, computational social science, or some other related topic) and want to set up a time to chat

I will do my best to reply promptly. Students have called me an Email Ninja, but I make no promises.

If you would like to apply to work in Noah’s ARK:

If you are an undergraduate or masters student in Seattle and would like to work on research with my group, please complete this demonstration of research interest. Please follow the instructions carefully. In general, I encourage you to apply if you are a student at UW or any other school in or near Seattle, and you think you have a role to play in my ARK. Please note that my group has limited capacity for mentoring, and I will not invite people to work with the group if they won’t receive strong mentoring.

If you would like to apply to work at the Allen Institute for AI:

AI2, and specifically my team (AllenNLP), has applications online for a variety of positions, including research internships, engineering internships, predoctoral and postdoctoral researchers, engineers, and scientists. Find out more here.

Please do not email me if:

• you’re looking for an add code to take an NLP course. For winter 2025, you can petition to take CSE 517 here. Allen School policies are here. I don’t have add codes.

• you’re considering applying for grad school at UW

  This is great, and I encourage you to apply! Go for it, and feel free to discuss your research vision and how it would fit into my group in your statement. I can’t give any feedback on your application before or after you apply, but I typically look for a small number of new Ph.D. advisees each year. Please trust me that emailing me just to tell me that you’re applying will make absolutely no difference! If you have specific technical questions, see the “please email me” section above. Also, I’ve written some advice for people applying to grad school in computer science that might be useful to you.

• you’re considering applying for grad school at CMU

  This is great! Because I no longer work there, I can’t really help you.

• you don’t know me personally and want to visit or intern with my group

  I’m very sorry, but I cannot host you at this time, and I get a huge number of requests of this kind. If you are a student and know a professor who thinks I should find a way to make it work, please ask him/her to contact me on your behalf.