Sanda Harabagiu’s work in natural language processing is her passion, her pleasure and an enthusiastic endeavor.
Studying the computational aspects of human written communication requires cross-disciplinary studies that include linguistics, psychology, cognitive sciences and, naturally, artificial intelligence. Natural language processing is the oldest area of artificial intelligence, since the ability to comprehend texts and to automatically produce dialogs is a manifestation of complex intelligence.
“We want to capture how human communication works in textual form – how people manage to convey ideas and how other people understand those ideas,” she said. “That makes my work inherently interdisciplinary.”
Dr. Harabagiu holds doctorates from both the University of Southern California and the University of Rome. And although her fluency in several languages isn’t directly applicable to her research, it certainly informs her work.
“I can value the importance of capturing the subtleties of language and cultural influences as well as different patterns of expression and the ways in which idioms are formed,” she said.
Her primary interest today is question answering, a rapidly growing field that develops algorithms for searching through immense amounts of information. To make efficient use of the world’s burgeoning amount of digital information – and that encompasses everything from academic databases to confessional blogs – efficient methods of question answering must be developed.
“We want to capture how human communication works in textual form – how people manage to convey ideas and how other people understand those ideas.”
Dr. Harabagiu is particularly interested in her work’s potential in the field of medicine, and she is now engaged in several international collaborations in text mining from biomedical texts.
“Doctors see patients and write reports while medical researchers are exploring virtually every aspect of medicine, and it takes a while for all these things to get connected,” she said. “When a new treatment is developed, doctors can’t possibly read all the articles on the subject, yet their ability to capture that information is very important. It could have an immediate impact on their patients’ lives.”
The recipient of a National Science Foundation Career Award, Dr. Harabagiu joined UTD in 2002 and holds the Erik Jonsson School Research Initiation Chair. She is also director of the Human Language Technology Research Institute, established at UTD in 2002. Home to several cross-disciplinary collaborations in the area of human language technology, the institute includes nearly 80 graduate students.
“I love teaching and the interaction that I have with young people,” she said. “I enjoy teaching both undergraduate and graduate students, despite the fact that they’re very different. With undergraduate students, you can open their eyes to ways of learning things. Grad students, on the other hand, can take a problem, model it, come up with something novel and interesting, and write expertly about it. You can watch them develop and blossom into experts.”
