Matthew A. Hernandez

Welcome to my technical blog.

I am an early career professional¹ with experience in machine learning, data management, and language technology. My recent experience includes fine-tuning NLP models for low-resource languages, and constructing novel datasets to support various linguistic phenomenon and evaluating LLMs on them.

I have an M.S. in Human Language Technology (Computational Linguistics) from the University of Arizona. My undergraduate degree was in Linguistics also.

My formal background is at the intersection of linguistics and computer science (yes, really²). That is to say, the study of extracting meaningful information from natural language. I learned the value of being an interdisciplinary individual and the importance of collaboration during my time with the computer science department. Although I’m not exclusively an NLPer and have been properly trained in understanding the mathematics of machine learning algorithms, developing efficient and clean code, and data science fundamentals.

Nowadays I am contributing to open-source software I find useful, responding to discussions, or scratching an itch for some topic (e.g., ontologies, evaluation) that’s boggling my mind.

Here I present an often misused (and misunderstood) quote that I find describes my notion to the tee:

A jack of all trades is a master of none...

... but oftentimes better than a master of one.

Footnotes