Rada Mihalcea Selected as General Chair for NAACL Conference

Prof. Rada Mihalcea has been selected to serve as general chair for the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL).

NAACL provides a regional focus for members of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in North America as well as in Central and South America, organizes annual conferences, promotes cooperation and information exchange among related scientific and professional societies, encourages and facilitates ACL membership by people and institutions in the Americas, and provides a source of information on regional activities for the ACL Executive Committee.

As general chair, Prof. Mihalcea is overseeing the entire conference. She is responsible for appointing people for various roles in the conference organization, including workshop co-chairs, tutorial co-chairs, publicity chairs, etc.; making sure that calls for papers and conference proceedings are compiled, made available, and publicized on time; interacting with other members of the organization to address other issues concerning budget, sponsorship, publicity, etc. NAACL will take place in May 2015 in Denver Colorado. It is the largest computational linguistics conference in North America, and one of the largest worldwide.

Prof. Mihalcea’s research interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical semantics, graph-based algorithms for natural language processing, and multilingual natural language processing. She is currently involved in a number of research projects, including word sense disambiguation, monolingual and cross-lingual semantic similarity, subjectivity, sentiment, and emotion analysis, multimodal affect analysis, and computational humor.

Prof. Rada Mihalcea received her PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Southern Methodist University. She joined the faculty at Michigan in 2013 after serving on the faculty at the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Texas.