Who We Are: Judith L. Klavans

Director of Research, Center for Advanced Study of Language

Judith Klavans is Director of Research, University of Maryland. She was previously, Director of the Center for Research on Information Access at Columbia University. The Center is responsible for linking theoretical computer science research with operational applications such as digital libraries and digital government. She is a principal investigator in several large projects, including the NSF-funded PERSIVAL medical digital library, the NSF and BLS supported Digital Government Research Center joint with University of Southern California-ISI, the DARPA-funded TIDES multilingual summarization project, and, most recently, the Mellon-supported CLiMB (Computational Linguistics for Metadata Building) project which links text and image collections. In May of 2003 she was appointed by the White House to PITAC, the Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee.

Klavans focuses her research on computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). She is currently working on ways to analyze both monolingual and multilingual texts and to link meaningful segments via semantic nets and syntactic structure. She has worked on linguistic and statistical methods for extracting and linking information from large online texts. Klavans has developed a novel method of text mining to use automatic methods for the extraction of glossaries from text. She has also developed a web-crawler for the identification of glossaries from large government websites. Terminological variation has been the focus of recent research in digital government and digital libraries.

Prior to arriving at Columbia, Klavans spent nearly ten years in the Computer Science Division of the T.J. Watson IBM Research Division, where her work included extracting information from machine-readable dictionaries, building bilingual aligned phrasal dictionaries, and text-to-speech. Klavans holds a Ph.D in Linguistics, summa cum laude, from the University of London, where she completed a dissertation on language variation across five typologically distinct language families including Cairene Egytpian Arabic, Pashto, Ngiyambaa (Australia), French and English. She then completed an interdisciplinary postdoctoral fellowship at MIT in Linguistics and Computer Science. She holds several patents and has published nearly one hundred technical articles.

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