Ani Nenkova facts for kids
| Alma mater | Columbia University (PhD in Computer Science) Sofia University (MS) |
|---|---|
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer Science Computational Linguistics Artificial Intelligence |
| Institutions | Adobe Research University of Pennsylvania Columbia University Sofia University |
| Thesis | Understanding the process of multi-document summarization: content selection, rewrite and evaluation (PhD thesis, 2006) Tableau Methods for Concept Languages (MS thesis, in Bulgarian, 2000) |
| Doctoral Advisor | Kathleen McKeown (Columbia University) |
| Postdoc Advisor | Dan Jurafsky (Stanford NLP) |
| Website | Personal website |
Ani Nenkova is a leading scientist at Adobe Research. She is also an associate professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on how computers can understand and use human language. This field is called computational linguistics. She also works in artificial intelligence, which is about making computers smart.
Her research helps computers understand how good writing is, different writing styles, feelings in text, and how to summarize information.
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Education and Early Career
Ani Nenkova studied at Sofia University in Bulgaria. There, she earned her master's degree in mathematical logic and applications.
Later, she went to Columbia University in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in computer science in 2006. Her advisor was Kathleen McKeown.
What She Does
Besides teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Ani Nenkova has held many important roles. She is a co-editor-in-chief for a journal called Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL). She also helps organize big conferences for groups like ACL, NAACL, and AAAI.
In the past, she was on the editorial board for the journal Computational Linguistics. She also worked as an associate editor for another journal about audio, speech, and language. In February 2021, Nenkova started a new job at Adobe Research. She became the head of a lab there while still teaching at Penn.
Her Research Work
Ani Nenkova's research explores how computers can understand human language. This is known as natural language processing. She works on making computers summarize texts and recognize emotions. She also studies how different parts of a conversation or text connect, which is called discourse.
Understanding Emotions
Nenkova and her team developed a new way for computers to recognize emotions in speech. Their method looks at specific parts of sounds or words. This helped computers understand feelings better than before.
What Makes Great Writing
Nenkova also researches what makes writing "great." She trains computer programs using special datasets of words. These datasets teach computers what words and phrases mean in different situations. Her big goal is to create new computer programs. These programs could analyze and understand new texts without needing a human to translate or explain them.
Tools and Projects
Ani Nenkova and her team have created many useful tools.
- Speciteller is a tool that can guess how specific a sentence is.
- CATS is a collection of science journalism articles. It was used for one of their research papers.
- SIMetrix (Summary Input Similarity Metrics) is a tool that automatically checks how good a summary is.
