Shira Wein

Shira Wein is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Amherst College, specializing in natural language processing and computational semantics. She received her Ph.D. from Georgetown University as a Clare Boothe Luce scholar, with research focusing on cross-lingual semantic representations and model evaluation. Her work has been applied in multilingual data analysis and AI education.

Research Interests: Dr. Wein's research examines how meaning is constructed across human languages using formal semantic representations like AMR and UMR. She investigates computational semantics, multilingual corpus linguistics, and model evaluation practices, with applications in low-resource language translation and AI education frameworks.

Publications: Her recent articles focus on semantic representations (AMR/UMR) for multilingual NLP tasks, including machine translation for indigenous languages, hallucination detection, and interpretation evaluation. The works show consistent emphasis on developing robust evaluation methodologies and addressing cross-linguistic challenges in semantic parsing and generation.

Awards:

• AAAI/ACM SIGAI New Educator Award (2024)
• Dr. Karen Gale Exceptional PhD Award (2024)
• Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award (2024)
• Graduate Student Teaching Award (2023)
• Clare Boothe Luce Scholarship (2021-2023)

Research Lab: Directs the ACNLP Lab at Amherst College advising 7+ undergraduate researchers. Secured research collaborations with Google, NASA JPL, and USC. Current projects include developing semantic representations for low-resource languages and evaluating LLM capabilities for translation tasks.