Arts | Science

07 Aug 09

A researcher from Oxford’s Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics Faculty has been honoured by President Barack Obama by being named as a recipient of a highly prestigious US award.

Dr Rada Mihalcea, who is a Research Associate in the Computational Linguistics Group, a DPhil student in the Faculty of Linguistics under the supervision of Prof Stephen Pulman, and an Associate Professor at the University of North Texas, has been awarded a US Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists. The award will be presented at the White House later this year.

She was one of just 100 young researchers in the whole of the US to be honoured with the award which is bestowed by the United States government on young professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

'These extraordinarily gifted young scientists and engineers represent the best in our country,' President Obama said. 'With their talent, creativity, and dedication, I am confident that they will lead their fields in new breakthroughs and discoveries and help us use science and technology to lift up our nation and our world.'

Dr Mihalcea received her award for her groundbreaking research on understanding the meaning of text, a critical capability for many important natural language and information processing applications, and for her exemplary commitments to education and community service. 

'I'm excited and honoured about this award,' Dr Mihalcea said. 'Thinking back to where I started, it makes me feel that everything is possible. I see it not only as a recognition of my research, but also as a recognition of everything that brought me to this point: my family and friends, my professors, and everything I learned from my books and the wonders around the world.'

Her research focuses on the semantic interpretation of text for language-processing applications. Rather than using just one resource to model the meanings of words, she finds ways to combine several different monolingual and multilingual lexical resources, covering a large number of languages, to create rich, flexible word meaning representations that can be adapted to specific language-processing applications.

Dr Mihalcea plans to explore the use of these representations in a number of applications, including automatic word and text translation, and text-to-text similarity. She also plans to integrate these models into educational applications, which can be used to build a tool to assist Spanish-speaking students comprehend English texts by providing simpler English synonyms or translations into Spanish.

Professor Aditi Lahiri, Faculty Board Chair of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, said: 'Rada Mihalcea is an excellent computational linguist with a broad range of interests. Her publication record is excellent and her recent award by President Obama reflects the excellent quality of her work. Her research on computational humour (detecting humour in written texts) forms one of her key interests. A recent paper published jointly with her supervisor Professor Stephen Pulman (Characterizing humor: An exploration of features in humorous text) was given the 'best paper award'. The Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics is proud and happy at her success.'

The Presidential awards were established by President Clinton in 1996 and are coordinated by the Office of Science and Technology Policy within the Executive Office of the President. Nine federal agencies join together annually to recommend recipients to the White House. Dr Mihalcea was recommended for the award by the US National Science Foundation.

Awardees are selected on the basis of two criteria: pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology, and a commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education, or community outreach. Winning scientists and engineers receive a research grant for up to five years to further their study in support of critical government missions.