Ph.D. - Computer Engineering
University of Southern California - 1997

Doctorate - Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
University of Rome - 1994

Diploma - Engineer in Computer Science and Engineering
Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest - 1983

A supervised framework for resolving corefence in clinical records. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), 2012(19):5:875-882. doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2012-000810 Kirk Roberts and Sanda M. Harabagiu 2012 - Publication

Kirk Roberts and Sanda M. Harabagiu Unsupervised Learning of Selectional Restrictions and Detection of Argument Coercions in the Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2011), pages 980–990, July 2011, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. 2011 - Publication

Bryan Rink, Sanda M. Harabagiu and Kirk Roberts Automatic extraction of relations between medical concepts in clinical texts. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), 2011(18)594-600. doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000153. 2011 - Publication

Travis Goodwin, Bryan Rink, Kirk Roberts and Sanda M. Harabagiu Cohort Shepherd: Discovering Cohort Traits from Hospital Visits in the Proceedings of the Twentieth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2011), Gaithersburg, Maryland, November 15-18, 2011. 2011 - Publication

Bryan Rink and Sanda M. Harabagiu A generative model for unsupervised discovery of relations and argument classes from clinical texts in the Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2011), pages 519–528, July 2011, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. 2011 - Publication

Kirk Roberts and Sanda M. Harabagiu A flexible framework for deriving assertions from electronic medical records. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), 2011(18)568-573. doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000152. 2011 - Publication

Cosmin A. Bejan and Sanda M. Harabagiu Unsupervised Event Coreference Resolution with Rich Linguistic Features Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Uppsala, Sweden, July 2010 - ACL 2010 2010 - Publication

Sanda M. Harabagiu and Finley Lacatusu Using Topic Themes for Multi-Document Summarization ACM Transactions on Information Systems, Vol 28, No 3, Article 13, June 2010 2010 - Publication

Associate Professor
The University of Texas at Dallas [2002–Present]

Assistant Professor
The University of Texas [2001–2002]

Assistant Professor
Southern Methodist University [1998–2001]

Researcher
SRI International [1997–1998]
Artificial Intelligence Center

Research Associate
Southern Methodist University [1996–1997]

Research Assistant
Souther Methodist University [1994–1996]

Research Assistant
University of Southern California [1992–1993]

Research Fellow
Fondazione Ugo Bordoni [1991–1993]

Researcher
INCREST (Romanian National Research Institute) [1985–1991]

Computer Engineer
INCREST (Romanian National Research Institute) [1983–1985]

Current and Future Trends in Question Answering

2006–2006 S. Harabagiu, Current and Future Trends in Question Answering, Distinguished Lecturer Symposium Series, Johns Hopkins' Center for Language and Speech Processing, November 2006.

Scenario-Based Question Answering

2006–2006 S. Harabagiu, Scenario-Based Question Answering, Keynote Invited Speech, COLING/ACL-2006 Workshop on Task-Focused Summarization and Question Answering, July 2006, Sydney Australia.

Empowering Today's Customers with New Tools for Information Seeking

2003–2003 S. Harabagiu, Empowering Today's Customers with New Tools for Information Seeking, Keynote Invited Speech, Langtech 2003, Paris, France.

Honors and Awards

• AQUAINT-3 award AQUINAS: Answering Questions Using INference and Advanced Semantics", 2006-2008.
• AQUAINT-2 award "AQUINAS: Answering Questions Using INference and Advanced Semantics", 2004-2008.
• AQUAINT award "Computational Implicatures for Advanced Question Answering", 2002-2005.
• National Science Foundation Faculty Early CAREER Development Award, 2000-2005.
• National Science Foundation award "CADRE: A Tool for Transforming WordNet into a Core Knowledge Base", 2000-2004.
• ARP award "Open-Domain Information Extraction", 2002-2004. Southern Methodist University Research Award, 1999-2000.
• Fondazione Ugo Bordoni Research Award, 1991-1993.

Professional Activities

• Organizer with Drs. Daniel Bobrow, Dan Moldovan, Christopher Manning, Srini Narayanan and Ken Forbus of the AAAI-05 Workshop on Inference for Textual Question Answering, July 9 2005, Pittsburgh, PA.
• Co-chair with Dr. David Farwell of the ACL-2004 Workshop on Reference Resolution and its Applications, Barcelona, Spain, July 2004.
• Co-instructor with Dr. Srini Narayanan of the HLT-NAACL'2004 Tutorial on Semantic Inference for Question Answering, Boston MA, May 2004.
• Co-chair with Finley Lacatusu of the HLT-NAACL'2004 Workshop on Pragmatics of Question Answering, Boston MA, May 2004.
• Co-chair with Prof. Rodolfo Delmonte of the 2003 International Symposium on Reference Resolution for Question Answering and Summarization, Venice, Italy, June 2003.
• Co-Chair with Drs. Nancy Chinchor, Beth Hezler and Lucy Nowell of the ACL'2002 Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Vizualization.
• Co-chair with Dr. Vinay Chaudhri of the AAAI-2002 Spring Symposium on Mining Answers from Texts and Knowledge Bases, Stanford University, March 2002.
• Co-chair with Prof. Antonio Ferrandez Rodriguez of the 2002 International Symposium on Reference Resolution in Natural Language Processing, Alicante, Spain, June 2002.
• Instructor of the COLING-2002 Tutorial on Question/Answering Systems.
• Co-instructor with Prof. Dan Moldovan of the IJCAI-2001 Tutorial on Question/Answering Systems.
• Co-instructor with Prof. Dan Moldovan of the NA-ACL-2001 Tutorial on Question/Answering Systems.
• Co-Organizer with Prof. Dan Moldovan of the NA-ACL'2001 Workshop WordNet and other Lexical Resources - Extensions and NLP Applications.
• Co-Organizer with Yael Ravin and John Prager from IBM Research of the ACL'2001 Workshop on Open-Domain Question Answering.
• Led the research committee that developed the Roadmap for Question Answering Research for the years 2001-2006. This activity has been undertaken under the DARPA TIDES project.
• Co-Organizer with Joyce Chai from Duke University of the COLING-ACL '98 Workshop on Usage of WordNet in Natural Language Processing Systems, 1998.
• Editor Proceedings of the COLING-ACL'98 Workshop on the Usage of WordNet in Natural Language Processing Systems, Montreal, Canada, August 1998.

Prof Calls Jeopardy! Match a Computing Milestone

When an IBM supercomputer named Watson takes on human contestants on the quiz show Jeopardy! this week, it will represent the latest triumph of advances that could one day enable people to interact much more naturally with computers, according to a UT Dallas expert in human-machine interaction. “This is a milestone because Watson will compete directly against humans, and moreover against the champions of Jeopardy!” said Dr. Sanda Harabagiu, a leader in the field of human-computer interaction for more than a decade. “This is important, and it’s a more realistic gauge than simply comparing a system to search engines.” It’s hard enough to create a system that can interact via spoken language fast enough to compete on Jeopardy!, but Harabagiu and her collaborators in the University’s Human Language Technology Research Institute are already working on even more complex human-computer interactions.

Computer Science Professor Earns Distinguished Paper Award

Travis Goodwin BS'11, MS'13, a computer science PhD student at UT Dallas, and Dr. Sanda Harabagiu, professor of computer science and Research Initiation Chair in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, received the Homer R. Warner Award at the 2017 American Medical Informatics Association’s (AMIA) Annual Symposium.

The award recognizes a symposium paper that best describes approaches to improving computerized information acquisition, knowledge data acquisition and management, and experimental results documenting the value of these approaches.

Human Language Technology Research Institute Established at The University of Texas at Dallas

RICHARDSON, Texas (Feb. 25, 2002) - The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) today announced that it has established a research institute aimed at advancing the understanding and uses of natural language processing, a science that has grabbed the attention of federal government intelligence agencies in the wake of Sept. 11.

The technology, which utilizes sophisticated software tools, has the potential to help security personnel simultaneously screen and analyze millions of voice and text communications in an attempt to uncover terrorist or other criminal activities. Other possible uses include customer support applications in many lines of business.

The research, new at UTD, will be carried out at the newly established Human Language Technology Research Institute in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. The effort will be headed by Dr. Sanda Harabagiu, director of the institute and an associate professor of computer science in the Jonsson School. Harabagiu also holds the Jonsson School Research Initiation Chair Professorship.

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