معرفی
Katrin Erk is a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, holding joint appointments in the Department of Linguistics and Department of Computer Science. She is actively involved in UT Austin NLP and computational linguistics groups and serves as a faculty advisor in the Natural Language Learning reading group.
- Education: PhD in Linguistics from Saarland University (2002), dissertation on tree description languages and ellipsis
- Research Focus: Computational semantics, graded word meaning representations, and integration of distributional models with logic-based sentence semantics
Her work takes a distributional approach to lexical semantics, using word embeddings and contextualized representations to study how word meanings are modulated by context without relying on predefined sense inventories. At the sentence level, she develops probabilistic frameworks that combine logical representations with distributed models for weighted inference. Recent research explores narrative schemas and their role in understanding word connotations through typical story patterns.
Key article trends show interdisciplinary work at the intersection of machine learning and linguistic theory, focusing on semantic representation challenges. Her publications demonstrate expertise in implicit argument prediction, world knowledge integration, and semantic plausibility modeling through computational methods.
Scientific Awards:
- 2017: CSLI Fellow, Stanford
- 2013: College Research Fellowship, UT Austin
- 2009: Big XII Faculty Fellowship, UT Austin
- 2008: Dean’s Fellowship, UT Austin
- 2007: Summer Research Assignment, UT Austin
- 1998-2001: Doctoral Dissertation Scholarship from German Research Foundation (DFG)
- 1995-1998: Scholarship from Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes
- 1994-1995: Scholarship from German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)
She maintains active office hours (Tuesdays 9:45-10:45, Wednesdays 10-11 and 3-4 in Fall 2024) and can be reached at katrin.erk@mail.utexas.edu.
