I am a computer science teacher and researcher, investigating how meaning is constructed in various human languages.
I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department of Amherst College, since fall 2024. Before starting my new position at Amherst, I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgetown University, where I was the recipient of a Clare Boothe Luce scholarship.
My research is in the area of natural language processing and I am specifically interested in computational semantics, multilingual data, and model evaluation practices. I have previously completed research at Google, the University of Southern California, and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In addition to research, I am passionate about teaching courses across the computer science curriculum and mentoring undergraduates.
News
- (June 2025) Our ACNLP lab paper (Amherst students Thu and Mina, plus myself) on the role of PropBank sense numbers in AMR technologies was accepted to the Designing Meaning Representations workshop!
- (May 2025) My paper on generating low-resource languages via prompting with Uniform Meaning Representation is accepted to the ACL Main Conference!
- (November 2024) I have a 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) I have one paper about AMR applications accepted to the EMNLP main conference.
- (May 2024) I was awarded the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the Georgetown Computer Science Department.
- (April 2024) I was 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.