Acknowledgements
As I was writing these lines of acknowledgement s, it struck me t hat 5 years have already
passed, blazingly fast but truly rewarding. At the beginning of my PhD, I thought it would
be a long, painful multi-year period of my li fe (yes, there had been ups and downs!), but
by the time I was close to finishing, my PhD duration became surprising short as I kept
wondering: will I ever have a chance to live again in such a stimulating, inspiring, and
caring environm ent with little p ressure and full freedom for academic and personal devel-
opment that Stanford and the CS department had offered? All of my achievements will not
be possible without the help of m any people.
First and foremost, I would like to extend my deepest appreciation to my advisor, Chris
Manning, whom I canno t find any poi nt to complain about. Chris has given me so much in-
spiration for my academic career and provided me countless support for almost any matters
including personal ones. I learned from him how to build up my academic “brand”, when
to say no to distractors, what to give to others, and many, many more great things. Without
him, it will be uncertain if I can make it all the way through my PhD. To get a sense of
Chris’s hard work, I invite readers to visit th is link https://github.com/lmthang/
thesis/issues which documents all of his edits to my thesis, page by page.
I would also like to thank other members in my thesis committee, Dan Jurafsky, Andrew
Ng, Quoc Le, and Christopher Potts for providing feedback to my t hesis and making sure I
can graduate. I am grateful to Quoc Le, Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, and other colleagues
at Google Brain who have inspired me to do research in deep learning. It was a fortunate
turn of m y life when interni n g at Google Brain in 2014 and 2015 during which I h ad
learned how to train my first deep neural network in Neural Machine Translation! Quoc
Le deserves special menti on for being my mai n hosts during t h es e two internships and for
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