Martha Palmer and Colleagues Receive Funding to Build Language-Understanding Systems

Martha Palmer, CU Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science, working with collaborators both at CU and around the country, have secured over $2 million in funding for a wide range of multi-year interdisiciplinary projects in automated languge understanding, with critical applications to national security, medical diagnosis and disaster response. 

• Professors Palmer, Jordan Boyd-Graber (CSCI) and Laura Michaelis (LING) have received a three-year award for $750,000 from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency for eTASC, Empirical Evidence for a Theoretical Approach to Semantic Components. 
• Professors Palmer, Jim Martin (CSCI), Wayne Ward (Boulder Language Technologies) and Jordan Boyd-Graber have received a three-year subaward for $531,328 from the National Institutes of Health for the renewal of THYME (Temporal History of Your Medical Events) with primary investigator (PI) Dr. Guergana Savova, at Boston Children’s Hospital.
• Prof. Palmer has received a three-year, $280,000 subaward from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for Lorelei (Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents) with PI Stephanie Strassel, of the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania.
• Prof. Palmer has received a three-year subaward from DARPA, Communicating with Computers, for $450,000, with PI Dan Roth, of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Prof. Palmer is an internationally recognized leader in data-driven approaches to natural-language processing. She is considered the world's leading expert in annotation science, and supports a large number of undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral researchers in her labs. She is co-director of CU's Center for Computational Language and Education Research (CLEAR).