I am a PhD candidate in the Computer Science Department at the University of Massachusetts,

Amherst and am a member of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval.  Bruce Croft

is my advisor. I am finishing my dissertation this summer and have accepted a faculty position in the

computer science department at  Mount Holyoke College.

Dissertation Research

My dissertation research is in the area of Cross-language Information Retrieval.

These are systems that allow a person to query in one language (e.g. English)

and retrieve relevant documents in other languages (e.g. Spanish).

In my thesis research I have developed a very effective approach to cross-language

retrieval based on translation via machine readable dictionary, augmented with

statistical techniques for reducing the effects of translation ambiguity. The

statistical techniques are based on analysis of word co-occurrence in text.

Publications on my research in cross-language retrieval can be found here.

Research Interests

Much of my research experience has been in information retrieval, but I have a diverse

research background. I have also worked with Paul Cohen on applying AI techniques

years doing basic research in Molecular and Cellular Biology.

My research interests span a broad spectrum of information access and knowledge

management issues. As the amount of on-line information continues to explode, there

is an increasing need for systems that facilitate the manipulation and analysis of

information. I am particularly interested in developing techniques for text analysis and

in exploring the ways in which these techniques can be used for other data types. Areas

of interest include the following:

data mining (automatically identifying significant relationships from large amounts

   of information).

 data fusion (combining different types of information)

 extraction (identifying pre-specified types of information).

summarization (abstraction of the most important parts of text)

Curriculum Vitae

Publications