Martha Palmer
Research Professor of Distinction • Director Emeritus of CLASIC
Linguistics • Computer Science

Having retired from the position of Professor of Distinction of Linguistics and Computer Science in 2021, Martha Palmer is now a Research Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science and an Institute of Cognitive Science Faculty Fellow. Her PhD is in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. She is an Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) Fellow, and has won an Outstanding Graduate Advisor 2014 Award, a Boulder Faculty Assembly 2010 Research Award and was the Director of the 2011 Linguistics Institute in Boulder. Her research is focused on capturing elements of the meanings of words that can comprise automatic representations of complex sentences and documents. Supervised machine learning techniques rely on vast amounts of annotated training data so she and her students are engaged in providing data with word sense tags and semantic role labels for English, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and Urdu, funded by DARPA and NSF. They also train automatic sense taggers and semantic role labelers. A more recent focus is the application of these methods to biomedical journal articles and clinical notes, funded by NIH. She co-edits LiLT, Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, and has been a co-editor of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering and on the CLJ Editorial Board. She is a past President of ACL, and past Chair of SIGLEX and SIGHAN.