Rusty Taylor
CV (PDF)

Rusty Taylor

Computational and philological analysis of Hebrew Psalms.

Research Interests

Computational and philological analysis of Hebrew Psalms. I study how formal linguistic patterns and textual variation across manuscript witnesses bear on traditional accounts of Hebrew poetic form.

Education

  • M.S. Computer Science  Georgia Institute of Technology2025

    Specialization in Artificial Intelligence  GPA 4.0

  • B.S. Computer Science  Western Governors University2020

    Excellence Award in Artificial Intelligence

  • M.A. Old Testament and Semitic Languages  Trinity Evangelical Divinity School2015

    Magna cum laude  GPA 3.83

    Thesis: Translated Repetitions in Septuagint Proverbs. Readers: Eric J. Tully and Dennis R. Magary. ProQuest 1597036

  • B.A. Biblical Studies  Florida College2005

    Cum laude  GPA 3.5  Minor in Mathematics

Languages

  • PrimaryHebrew Epigraphic, Biblical, Qumranic, Mishnaic, Modern  Greek Hellenistic
  • ReadingAramaic Imperial, Palestinian, Syriac  Canaanite Phoenician, Ammonite, Moabite, Edomite  Coptic Sahidic  Hittite
  • ModernEnglish native  French reading  German basic reading

Research Experience

  • Tehillim: Computational Analysis of the Psalms  tehillim.dev  github.com/rdtaylorjr/tehillim2026–present

    Benchmark apparatus on ETCBC BHSA via Text-Fabric: formal and distributional representations of Hebrew verse scored for parallelism and genre against replaceable baselines. Testing, reproducing, and extending Trublet (1991) and van Peursen (2020). Adaptation of DSS2ETCBC to align 11Q5 to BHSA.

  • Transcriber, Critical Edition of the Hebrew Psalter (CEHP), Duke Divinity School2026–present

    Transcribing MK31 (docID 350007) for the eclectic critical edition of Psalms 1–50, directed by Brent A. Strawn and Drew Longacre.

  • Graduate Research Assistant to Martin G. Abegg Jr. and Peter W. Flint, Trinity Western University2011–2013

    Transcription and morphological tagging of Mishnah manuscripts; syntactic tagging of Dead Sea Scrolls texts; transcription and indexing of Naḥal Ḥever Greek papyri for The Dead Sea Scrolls Concordance, vol. 2 (Brill, 2016); research and drafting for edited volumes with P. Flint.

Publications

Conference Papers

  • Taylor, Russell, Benjamin Herbert, and Michael Sana. “Pun Intended: Multi-agent Translation of Wordplay with Contrastive Learning and Phonetic-Semantic Embeddings.” In Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction. Edited by Matthias Hagen et al. LNCS 17087. Springer, 2026. doi:10.1007/978-3-032-39150-6_20.  (forthcoming)
  • Taylor, Russell, Adam Brikman, and Prateek Awate. “Searching for Sound-Meaning Collisions: Graph-Based Affordance Retrieval and Multi-Evaluator Ranking for Pun Translation at CLEF 2026 JOKER Task 2.” Pages 4295–4306 in Working Notes of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2026. arXiv:2608.04299.  First place, JOKER Task 2.  (forthcoming)
  • Taylor, Russell, Benjamin Herbert, and Michael Sana. “Pun Intended: Multi-Agent Translation of Wordplay with Contrastive Learning and Phonetic-Semantic Embeddings for CLEF JOKER 2025 Task 2.” Pages 2870–2888 in Working Notes of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum. CEUR Workshop Proceedings 4038, 2025. CEUR-WS Vol-4038, 2870–2888.  Best of CLEF 2025 Labs.  First place, JOKER Task 2.

Book Chapters

  • Taylor, Russell. “‘Your Eyes Will Be Opened’: Inner-Biblical Allusion and Creation Language in John 9.” Pages 119–138 in The Works No One Else Did: The Miracles of Jesus. Edited by David McClister. Florida College Annual Lectures. Temple Terrace, FL: Florida College Press, 2019.

Publications continued

Book Reviews

  • Taylor, Russell. Review of Proverbs (The Story of God Bible Commentary), by Ryan P. O'Dowd. Books at a Glance, 2018.
  • Taylor, Russell. Review of Rediscovering the Dead Sea Scrolls: An Assessment of Old and New Approaches and Methods, edited by Maxine L. Grossman. Pages 455–458 in Perspectives on Hebrew Scriptures X: Comprising the Contents of Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, vol. 13. Edited by Christophe Nihan and Ehud Ben Zvi. Gorgias, 2017. doi:10.31826/9781463237646-034

Conference Presentations

  • “Translation Technique and Lexical Choice in Greek Exodus.” Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, IOSCS session, Chicago, November 2012.
  • “Syntactic Functions of the Particle כי in Qumran Hebrew.” Pacific Northwest Regional Meeting of the AAR/SBL and ASOR, March 2012.  First Prize, Graduate Student Paper Competition.

Teaching

  • Instructional Associate, CS 6601 Artificial Intelligence, Georgia Institute of Technology2026–present

    Wrote the deep learning lecture series delivered by the professor of record; assignment lead for 1,500-student graduate course; academic integrity review, student forums, office hours, and assessment.

  • Guest Lecturer, RELS 245 Elementary Biblical Hebrew, Trinity Western University2012–2013

    Lectured on Biblical Hebrew grammar for a course taught by Martin G. Abegg Jr.

Professional Experience

  • Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Spectrum2024–present

    Technical lead for real-time machine learning systems, responsible for model serving and the pipelines feeding them.

  • Senior Software Engineer, Nielsen2021–2024

    Trained and evaluated classifiers over large-scale behavioral data; built the distributed pipelines supplying their training data.

  • Software Engineer, Accordance Bible Software2019–2021

    Built and maintained specialized right-to-left Hebrew and Aramaic datasets optimized for linguistic analysis. Parsed and normalized unstructured ancient-language text for downstream processing.

Skills

  • Digital PhilologyBHSA, Text-Fabric, Emdros/MQL, Andersen-Forbes, Holmstedt-Abegg, Westminster morphology, TEI
  • Data AnalysisNumPy, SciPy, pandas, Parquet, Jupyter, matplotlib
  • Machine LearningPyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, sentence-transformers, scikit-learn, gensim
  • EngineeringPython, Scala, Java, SQL, Spark, AWS, Docker, Linux

Memberships

  • Society of Biblical Literature
  • European Association of Biblical Studies
  • Association for Computational Linguistics

Last updated September 10, 2026