Isabelle Augenstein

Last updated
Isabelle Augenstein
Professor Isabelle Augenstein, University of Copenhagen, October 2022.jpg
Alma mater Heidelberg University
University of Sheffield
Scientific career
FieldsNatural language processing
Institutions University of Copenhagen

Isabelle Augenstein is a computer scientist working in the field of natural language processing. She is currently a full professor and head of the NLP section at the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen. She is also a co-lead at the Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence, [1] Denmark's largest research centre initiated by the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science. [2] She is well known for being appointed the youngest female full professor in Denmark [3] [4] and for her work on detecting gender bias, fact-checking, and stance detection using computational methods.

Contents

Early life and education

Isabelle Augenstein grew up in South-West Germany, attending gymnasium in Pforzheim, a city between Stuttgart and Karlsruhe. She did her undergraduate studies in Computational Linguistics and Psychology at Heidelberg University. [5] She earned a Master of Arts in Computational Linguistics at the Heidelberg University as well. She went on to work as a Research Assistant at AIFB, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. For her doctoral studies, she moved to the UK, getting a PhD in computer science from the University of Sheffield. She worked under the supervision of Dr. Diana Maynard and Prof. Fabio Ciravegna, writing a thesis on Web Information Extraction using Linked Data. [6] In 2021, she also earned a Habilitation while at the University of Copenhagen on Explainable Fact-checking. [7]

Career

Upon graduating from University of Sheffield, Augenstein joined the Machine Reading Group at University College London as a post-doctoral researcher, working with Sebastian Riedel. [8] She then joined University of Copenhagen as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor. She was promoted to Associate and eventually Full Professor and Head of the Natural Language Processing Section at the University of Copenhagen, where she still serves in that capacity. [9] She was also the Deputy Head of Research and Founding Employee at Checkstep, a startup focused on content moderation. In 2020, she was awarded a Sapere Aude fellowship from Independent Research Fund Denmark. Since August 2021, she is a member of the Young Academy, a scientific forum for excellent young researchers under the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. [10] She was awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant, a grant supporting up-and-coming independent research leaders, for her project on Explainable and Robust Fact-checking. [11]

Research

Augenstein works in the area of natural language processing. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed research articles and her work has been cited over 6500 times. [12] Her early work was on relation extraction and building NLP methods for Semantic Web. She went on to publish influential work on Rumour and Stance Detection including the most cited paper on Stance Detection. [13] She is well known for her work on fact-checking, gender bias, and explainability, which has often attracted media attention. [14] [15]

Miscellaneous

Augenstein is one of the founders of Widening NLP, a group seeking to increase the proportion of women and minorities working in natural language processing. She also holds a black belt in the martial arts of Taekwondo. [16]

Related Research Articles

Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related to information retrieval, knowledge representation and computational linguistics, a subfield of linguistics. Typically data is collected in text corpora, using either rule-based, statistical or neural-based approaches in machine learning and deep learning.

Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are considered as psychologically real, and research in cognitive linguistics aims to help understand cognition in general and is seen as a road into the human mind.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">UCPH Department of Computer Science</span> Department at University of Copenhagen

The UCPH Department of Computer Science is a department in the Faculty of Science at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). It is the longest established department of Computer Science in Denmark and was founded in 1970 by Turing Award winner Peter Naur. As of 2021, it employs 82 academic staff, 126 research staff and 38 support staff. It is consistently ranked the top Computer Science department in the Nordic countries, and in 2017 was placed 9th worldwide by the Academic Ranking of World Universities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karen Spärck Jones</span> British computer scientist (1935–2007)

Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones was a self-taught programmer and a pioneering British computer scientist responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF), a technology that underlies most modern search engines. She was an advocate for women in computer science, her slogan being, "Computing is too important to be left to men." In 2019, The New York Times published her belated obituary in its series Overlooked, calling her "a pioneer of computer science for work combining statistics and linguistics, and an advocate for women in the field." From 2008, to recognize her achievements in the fields of information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP), the Karen Spärck Jones Award is awarded to a new recipient with outstanding research in one or both of her fields.

Dragomir R. Radev was an American computer scientist who was a professor at Yale University, working on natural language processing and information retrieval. He also served as a University of Michigan computer science professor and Columbia University computer science adjunct professor, as well as a Member of the Advisory Board of Lawyaw.

The Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies is a non-profit research institution founded in 2010 by Klaus Tschira, co-founder of SAP, through the Klaus Tschira Stiftung foundation. Situated at the intersection of the natural sciences, mathematics, and computer science, it is dedicated to the exploration of fundamental research, with its core focus being in the realm of processing, structuring, and analysis of datasets, encompassing a diverse array of research fields, from molecular biology to astrophysics.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to natural-language processing:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Veronica Dahl</span> Canadian computer scientist

Verónica Dahl is an Argentine/Canadian computer scientist, who is recognized as one of the 15 founders of the field of logic programming.

Marilyn A. Walker is an American computer scientist. She is professor of computer science and head of the Natural Language and Dialogue Systems Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Her research includes work on computational models of dialogue interaction and conversational agents, analysis of affect, sarcasm and other social phenomena in social media dialogue, acquiring causal knowledge from text, conversational summarization, interactive story and narrative generation, and statistical methods for training the dialogue manager and the language generation engine for dialogue systems.

Ann Alicia Copestake is professor of computational linguistics and head of the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Iryna Gurevych</span> German computer scientist

Iryna Gurevych, member Leopoldina, is a Ukrainian computer scientist. She is Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the Technical University of Darmstadt and Director of Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rada Mihalcea</span> American computer scientist

Rada Mihalcea is the Janice M. Jenkins Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. She has made contributions to natural language processing, multimodal processing, and computational social science. With Paul Tarau, she is the co-inventor of TextRank Algorithm, which is widely used for text summarization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pushpak Bhattacharyya</span>

Pushpak Bhattacharyya is a computer scientist and a professor at Computer Science and Engineering Department, IIT Bombay. He served as the director of Indian Institute of Technology Patna from 2015 to 2021. He is regarded as the Godfather of NLP in India, mentioned by Nandan Nilekani, Co-founder and non-executive chairman of Infosys at the Inaugural event of Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat, IIT Madras. He is a past president of Association for Computational Linguistics (2016–17), and Ex-Vijay and Sita Vashee Chair Professor He currently heads the Natural language processing research group Center For Indian Language Technology (CFILT) lab at IIT Bombay.

Martha (Stone) Palmer is an American computer scientist. She is best known for her work on verb semantics, and for the creation of ontological resources such as PropBank and VerbNet.

Bonnie Jean Dorr is an American computer scientist specializing in natural language processing, machine translation, automatic summarization, social computing, and explainable artificial intelligence. She is a professor and director of the Natural Language Processing Research Laboratory in the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering at the University of Florida. Gainesville, Florida She is professor emerita of computer science and linguistics and former dean at the University of Maryland, College Park, former associate director at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition,, and former president of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Verena Rieser is a German computer scientist specialising in natural-language generation, including conversational modelling as well as studies of how gender cues in synthetic language can trigger biases in the people who interact with them. She is a professor in the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, where she directs the Natural Language Processing Laboratory.

Heng Ji is a computer scientist who works on information extraction and natural language processing. She is well known for her work on joined named entity recognition and relation extraction, as well as for her work on cross-document event extraction. She has been coordinating the popular NIST TAC Knowledge Base Population task since 2010. She has been recognised as one of AI's 10 to watch by IEEE Intelligent Systems in 2013, and has won multiple awards, including a NSF Career Award in 2009, Google Research awards in 2009 and 2014, and an IBM Watson Faculty Award in 2012.

Mona Talat Diab is a computer science professor and director of Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute. Previously, she was a professor at George Washington University and a research scientist with Facebook AI. Her research focuses on natural language processing, computational linguistics, cross lingual/multilingual processing, computational socio-pragmatics, Arabic language processing, and applied machine learning.

Yang Liu is a Chinese and American computer scientist specializing in speech processing and natural language processing, and a senior principal scientist for Amazon.

References

  1. ↑ "Isabelle Augenstein". Pioneer Centre for AI.
  2. ↑ Kristensen, Tina Virenfeldt (19 October 2022). "The Danish Pioneer Centre for AI marks its official opening". di.ku.dk.
  3. ↑ "University of Copenhagen announcement".
  4. ↑ Fjeldberg, Anders (3 November 2022). "Isabelle Augenstein is Denmark's youngest female professor". University Post.
  5. ↑ "Heidelberg University Alumni page".
  6. ↑ "Diana Maynard". staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk.
  7. ↑ "Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen tweet".
  8. ↑ Bartolo, Max. "UCL NLP". nlp.cs.ucl.ac.uk.
  9. ↑ "Natural Language Processing". di.ku.dk. August 22, 2019.
  10. ↑ "Isabelle Augenstein".
  11. ↑ "Explainable and Robust Automatic Fact Checking". CORDIS. Retrieved 2023-08-12.
  12. ↑ "Isabelle Augenstein". scholar.google.com.
  13. ↑ "Google Scholar". scholar.google.com.
  14. ↑ Damiani, Jesse. "Massive Machine Learning Study Demonstrates Gender Stereotyping And Sexist Language In Literature". Forbes.
  15. ↑ "DR".
  16. ↑ "Norrebro Taekwondo Club".
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.