Before you email me about joining my research group at the graduate level, this is how I will respond:
I am very reluctant to take on new students unless there is reliable funding for the entire duration of your graduate studies. That means you either need to find funding for yourself, or I need to already have a funded project. At the moment I do not have any funding to hire a graduate student and I do not anticipate funding in the coming year. Our programs (master’s and doctoral) do have limited funding opportunities, but those are very competitive and usually only guarantee one or two semesters worth of funding.
To be successful in my research group at the graduate level, you already need to have some experience in statistics, machine learning, natural language processing, and spoken dialogue systems. Particularly at the doctoral level, it’s not enough to “be interested” in those areas; you need to at least have taken a few courses and gained some practical experience before you will be able to do productive research in my group. Furthermore, and *more importantly* technical skills are not enough. At the doctoral level, you need to be well read in relevant research, have ideas as to what research needs to be conducted next, organizational skills to see those research projects through, and good writing skills. If you don't have a scientific writing sample, your chances of getting funding are pretty low.
Take note that a lot of the "prospective student" emails I get sound the same. It is not a good first impression if you send me an AI-generated email. In fact, I find it reprehensible if you just use this text as a prompt to help generate your email and you claim that you know my research and read my papers when you clearly havent. It's very obvious to me if that is what you have done. If you do that, I do not want to work with you and I would make sure any of our programs do not admit you. I will send your emails to the spam folder where they belong.
If you tell me that a paper "piqued your interest" I'm not all impressed because it's obvious to me that you haven't read it or know what the next steps should be. If you tell me you're interested in NLP and that you've been trying out some sentiment classification, it is obvious that you don't know what kind of research that I do. If you don't know what kind of research I do within NLP, there's no chance that you'll succeed working with me. I am not going to work with you as an independent researcher before you're accepted into one of our programs.
Most people do a PhD for the wrong reason. Doing a PhD isn't just do learn how to do research; there's another aspect to it that you need to sort out before you contact me. If I don't see in your email what you think that is, then I probably won't respond and if it's obvious that AI sorted that out for you, then you *really* are not suitable for a PhD. Sorry to be a bit harsh in this regard, but getting a PhD with a particular advisor is a huge undertaking and I want to make sure students and advisors are on the same page.
Don't try to add me on LinkedIn if we haven't met in person. I won't accept the request. Finally, if your email uses someting like Mailtrack I probably won't even respond. I speak for many faculty who find tracking emails very invasive. I recommend not using them.