Professional interests

I have completed two graduate degrees, which both focused on Natural Language Processing, and in particularly, on analysis and sense-making of written text.

During my PhD I have developed the open-source tool Maui, which automatically identifies the main topics in documents. Several experiments directly compared Maui's performance to that of professionals and amateurs. The results proved that Maui's topics are as good as those identified by people.

Practical applications of research always interested me, which lead to several internships:

• in a German start-up Exorbyte delivering high-speed performance fault-tolerant search solutions;
• in the European Media Lab (now HITs), which has one of the top NLP research groups in Europe;
• in the New York office of Google, the sentiment analysis team, where I worked with Google Blog search and Google News teams.

An interdisciplinary research project is worth mentioning, in which I collaborated with a philosophy professor Cathy Legg. Two publications describe our work on merging common-sense knowledge encoded in Cyc with factual and named entity information encoded in Wikipedia.

The core area of my research has been exploring Wikipedia for useful tidbits of knowledge about human language. Together with my colleagues, I have published a survey Mining Meaning from Wikipedia, which describes how researchers around the world use Wikipedia to solve many tasks, from automatic question answering to building ontologies.

Activities

I have been peer-reviewing for journals such as Information Retrieval Journal, Knowledge and Information Systems, The Computer Journal and Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery and served on the program committee for several conferences (SYRCoDis, NZ CSRSC, ACL-IJCNLP Workshop "People Web's meets NLP")

I was the initiator and main organizer of the New Zealand Computer Science Research Student Conference (NZCSRSC) in 2007, which is now revived to take place yearly. Each April grad students from all NZ universities meet to present their work, participate in workshops, meet industry and socialize.

In 2008, I was one of the finalists for the Google Australia & NZ Anita Borg Scholarship, which rewards women with leadership skills in technology fields.

Personal info

I grew up in a small town Kerch on the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine. Some people think that Kerch might be a possible location of Atlantis (I doubt :-))

My name is Russian, Alyona (Алена), however, it has been translated for my passport into the Ukrainian version "Olena", which I only use for official purposes.

My hobbies include Ashtanga Yoga, painting, hair dressing (certified) and traveling (I've lived in four countries and visited another dozen or so).
One unusual hobby is fire pois. There is a video of me swinging fire pois to Ian Witten's clarinet music.