Diane Litman Elected Association for Computational Linguistics Fellow

Diane Litman — director of the Intelligent Systems Program, a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science within the School of Computing and Information and a senior scientist in the Learning Research and Development Center—has been elected one of six new Association for Computational Linguistics Fellows for 2017.

The fellows program recognizes association members whose contributions to the field have been most extraordinary in terms of scientific and technical excellence, service to the association and the community and/or educational or outreach activities with broader impact.

Litman has been selected for her key contributions to dialog research, especially the application of reinforcement learning and multimodal analysis to tutoring dialog. The Association for Computational Linguistics began in 1968 and has since promoted innovative research in computational linguistics, the study of language from a computational perspective. Researchers such as Litman who are involved in this field are interested in providing computational models of various kinds of linguistic phenomena, and their accomplishments are incorporated into many working systems today, including speech recognition systems, digital voice assistants and text editors.