Judith Klavans

Adjunct Professor
Research Group(s): 
CLIP - Computational Linguistics and Information Processing
Education: 
Ph.D., University of London (Linguistics)
Biography: 

Judith Klavans is an adjunct professor in UMIACS and a senior research associate in the Department of Linguistics. She is also affiliated with the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) Lab.

Her research interests span computational linguistics, digital library research, natural language processing, and low-resource languages.

Klavans has worked on numerous computer science, digital library and digital government and linguistic projects. In particular, while at Columbia University as Director of the Center for Research on Information Access, she served as principal investigator on interdisciplinary research projects, including the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded PERSIVAL medical digital library, the NSF and Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) supported Digital Government Research Center joint project with University of Southern California-ISI, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-funded TIDES multilingual summarization project.

At UMD, Klavans was the principal investigator on the Mellon Foundation-funded Computational Linguistics for Metadata Building (CLiMB) research project, which she initiated at Columbia University in 2002. This project involved 16 museum partners for the automatic creation of metadata for images, a research area which has had wide implications in other applications, including intelligence and web-scraping. In addition to leading the project, she has been involved in developing analysis and filtering techniques for the extraction of metadata, particularly through thesaurus-driven disambiguation.

Klavans also participated in research on summarization on the NSF-funded “iOPENER - A Flexible Framework to Support Rapid Learning in Unfamiliar Research Domains" project and on the DARPA-funded GALE project.

She was previously a senior scientific advisor at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory where she was responsible for strategic directions in language research.

Klavans received her doctorate in linguistics from the University of London in 1980.

Go here to view Klavans’s academic publications on Google Scholar.