Marilyn Walker is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and the Director of the NLP MS Program at UCSC. She is a fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), in recognition of her fundamental contributions to statistical methods for dialog optimization, to centering theory, and to expressive generation for dialog. Her current research includes work on computational models of dialogue interaction and conversational agents, controllable neural natural language generation, coreference resolution in open domain dialogue, analysis of affect, sarcasm and other social phenomena in social media dialogue, and statistical methods for training the dialogue manager for dialogue systems.

Before coming to Santa Cruz in 2009, Walker was a professor of computer science at the University of Sheffield. From 1996 to 2003, she was a principal member of the research staff at AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Research, where she worked on the AT&T Communicator project, developing a new architecture for spoken dialogue systems and statistical methods for dialogue management and generation. Walker has published more than 200 papers and has 10 U.S. patents granted or pending. She earned a B.A. in computer and information science at UC Santa Cruz, M.S. in computer science at Stanford University, and M.A. in linguistics and Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania.

E-Mail Address: mawalker@ucsc.edu, maw@soe.ucsc.edu
Title: Professor, Computer Science and Engineering
Department: Computer Science and Engineering
Telephone Number 831-459-1058 (email is better to reach me)
Office Location: Engineering 2, Room 267
Office Hours: by appointment
Mail Stop: SOE3
Research Areas: Conversational agents, social media analytics, computational models of dialogue, natural language processing
Projects: Athena: UCSC’s system for the Alexa Prize