The Ph.D. degree is the highest form of academic accomplishment. The Ph.D. dissertations below present some of the most advanced research being done at the time of their publication.
2006
| Graduate | Advisor(s) | Dissertation | Employer Upon Graduation |
| Fei Huang | Waibel | Multilingual Named Entity Extraction and Translation from Text and Speech | IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center |
| Chun Jin | Carbonell | Optimizing Multiple Continuous Queries | |
| Yan Liu | Carbonell | Conditional Graphical Models for Protein Structure Prediction | IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center |
| Robert Malkin | Waibel | Machine Listening for Context-Aware Computing | Google Inc. |
| Kenji Sagae | Lavie | A Multi-Strategy Approach for Parsing of Grammatical Relations in Transcripts of Parent-Child Dialogs | Researcher, University of Tokyo |
| Luo Si | Callan | Federated Search of Text Search Engines in Uncooperative Environments | Assistant Professor, Purdue University |
| Rong Yan | Hauptmann | Probabilistic Models for Combining Diverse Knowledge Sources in Multimedia Retrieval | IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center |
| Jian Zhang | Yang | A Probabilistic Framework for Multi-Task Learning | Assistant Professor, Purdue University |
2005
| Graduate | Advisor(s) | Dissertation | Employer Upon Graduation |
| Rosie Jones | Mitchell | Learning to Extract Entities from Labeled and Unlabeled Text | Yahoo Inc. |
| Guy Lebanon | Lafferty | Riemannian Geometry and Statistical Machine Learning | Assistant Professor, Purdue University |
| Octav Popescu | Koedinger | Logic-Based Natural Language Understanding in Intelligent Tutoring Systems | Research Programmer, CMU Human-Computer Interaction Institute |
| Katharina Probst | Lavie | Learning Transfer Rules for Machine Translation with Limited Data | Accenture |
| Yi Zhang | Callan | Bayesian Graphical Models for Adaptive Filtering | Assistant Professor, University of California Santa Cruz |
| Xiaojin (Jerry) Zhu | Lafferty, Rosenfeld | Semi-Supervised Learning with Graphs | Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin |
2004
| Graduate | Advisor(s) | Dissertation | Employer Upon Graduation |
| Hua Yu | Waibel | Recognizing Sloppy Speech | Google Inc. |
2003
| Graduate | Advisor(s) | Dissertation | Employer Upon Graduation |
| Rong Jin | Hauptmann | Statistical Approach toward Automatic Title Generation | Assistant Professor, Michigan State University |
| Chad Langley | Lavie | Domain Acion Classification and Argument Parsing for Interlingua-Based Spoken Language Translation | U.S. Government |
2002
| Graduate | Advisor(s) | Dissertation | Employer Upon Graduation |
| Kathy Baker | Carpenter, Mitamura | Guarded Constraints in Natural Language Processing | U.S. Government |
| Paul Placeway | Nyberg | High-Performance Multi-Pass Unification Parsing | Google Inc. |
| ChengXiang Zhai | Lafferty | Risk Minimization and Language Modeling in Text Retrieval | Assistant Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |