Marilyn A. Walker

Professor Marilyn A. Walker is a leading academic in Natural Language Processing and Dialogue Systems at the University of California Santa Cruz, with significant contributions to conversational agents, personality modeling, and narrative analysis. She has held visiting roles at Google Research and leadership positions at University of Sheffield and AT&T Labs.

• Education: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science (University of Pennsylvania, 1993), M.A. in Linguistics (University of Pennsylvania, 1993), M.S. in Computer Science (Stanford, 1988), B.A. in Computer and Information Science (UC Santa Cruz, 1984).

Research Interests include Natural Language Processing, Conversational Agents, Dialogue Systems, and Personality Modeling. Her work bridges machine learning with linguistic theory to enhance dialogue adaptivity and expressive language generation.

Scientific Awards include

• ACL Fellow (2016)
• Best Paper Awards at SIGDIAL 2016 and 2014
• Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2003-2009)

Grants exceed $2.5M, including NSF awards for projects like Interactive Dialog Agents for Social Language Development (2017) and Processing Opinion Sharing Dialog in Social Media (2011). She has also received corporate funding from Amazon, Fujitsu, and Hitachi.