I am a computer science researcher and teacher, building and evaluating multilingual language models.
I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Amherst College (since fall 2024), where I work on natural language processing research and teach undergraduates. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgetown University, where I was the recipient of a Clare Boothe Luce scholarship. I have previously completed research at Google, the University of Southern California, and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
My research is in the area of natural language processing. I am specifically interested in multilingual language modeling (language technologies for the world's languages), computational semantics (what text meaning), and model assessment (evaluating plus explaining model performance). Accordingly, my research lab is called COMPASS: Computational Outlooks on Multilingual Processing, Assessment, and Semantic Structures.
I will be recruiting both Ph.D. students and PostDocs starting fall 2026! Please reach out over email if you are interested.
News
- (June 2026) SIGDIAL 2026: Paper on LLM interpretability of discourse relations accepted to SIGDIAL!
- (May 2026) I gave the keynote talk at the Structured Linguistic Data (SLiDE) workshop at LREC: "When Does Linguistics Help? Downstream Utility of Linguistic Frameworks in the Age of LLMs"
- (April 2026) ACL 2026: Paper on translationese classification and interpretability accepted to appear at the ACL Main Conference!
- (March 2026) Papers accepted on Spanish Neologisms to the NeoLLM workshop and training users in AMR annotation to the DMR workshop, both co-located with LREC!
- (February 2026) LREC 2026: Paper accepted on text-to-UMR parsing!
- (December 2025) Outstanding Paper Award at IJCNLP-AACL for my paper on generating text from Uniform Meaning Representation (one of only three papers receiving this award), with Amherst students Emma and Rei!
- (November 2025) The ACM Massachusetts Gender-Inclusive Computing Celebration (MAGICC), for which I am on the Organizing Committee, happened at Amherst College, with two of my students presenting work.
- (October 2025) AACL-IJCNLP 2025: Two papers accepted, one on adversarial attack for semantic similarity and one on text generation via UMR.
- (October 2025) I have completed the NCFDD "Rethinking Your Research Funding" month-long online course.
- (September 2025) Paper accepted to Widening NLP (WiNLP) on using a GPT model to improve AMR-to-text generation fluency.
- (September 2025) Paper on semantic reasoning for natural language inference accepted to *SEM.
- (August 2025) EMNLP Findings paper on leveraging computational semantics for low-resource visual question answering!
- (June 2025) Paper on the role of PropBank sense numbers in AMR technologies accepted to the Designing Meaning Representations workshop.
- (May 2025) ACL 2025: my paper on generating low-resource languages via prompting with Uniform Meaning Representation is accepted to the ACL Main Conference!
- (November 2024) Paper on ambiguity in text and AMR annotations accepted to the Context and Meaning Workshop (at COLING).
- (November 2024) A Model AI Assignment I co-authored has been accepted to EAAI.
- (September 2024) EMNLP 2024: I have a paper about AMR applications accepted to the EMNLP main conference.
- (July 2024) I am beginning my new position as Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Amherst College!
- (May 2024) I am awarded the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the Georgetown Computer Science Department.
- (April 2024) I have been awarded Georgetown's Dr. Karen Gale Exceptional PhD Student Award.
- (March 2024) I attended EACL in Malta and presented two papers, one on translationese reduction and one on evaluating interpretation data.
- (February 2024) I have received the AAAI/ACM SIGAI New and Future AI Educator Award and am giving a talk at EAAI (co-located with AAAI, in Vancouver, Canada).
- (February 2024) I successfully defended my dissertation and am officially Dr. Shira Wein!
- (January 2024) I have two papers accepted to EACL– one at the main conference and one in Findings.
- (November 2023) I have an article accepted in Computational Linguistics on the cross-lingual utility of Abstract Meaning Representation.