Campus Directory

Division Baskin School of Engineering

Department/College/Unit Computer Science and Engineering

Title Professor Emerita

Affiliation Faculty

Faculty Type Emeriti

Areas of Expertise Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics
Machine Learning
Computer Science
Linguistics

Web Site

Primary Office Location Jack Baskin Engineering Building
N/A

Additional Location(s) Engineering 2, Room 267

Office Hours By appointment

Mail Stop SOE3

Biography, Education and Training

• Marilyn Walker, is a Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Cruz, and a fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), in recognition of her for fundamental contributions to statistical methods for dialog optimization, to centering theory, and to expressive generation for dialog. She is the Founder and  Director of the Natural Language Processing Professional M.S. Program at UCSC Silicon Valley. Her current research includes work on computational models of dialogue interaction and conversational agents, analysis of affect, sarcasm and other social phenomena in social media dialogue, acquiring causal knowledge from text, conversational summarization, and statistical methods for training the dialogue manager and the language generation engine 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, an M.S. in Computer Science at Stanford University, and an M.A. in linguistics and Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Research Interests

• Conversational agents
• Social media analytics
• Computational models of dialogue
• Interactive story and narrative generation
• Acquiring causal knowledge from blogs
• Natural language processing

Selected Publications

• Controlling User Perceptions of Linguistic Style: Trainable Generation of Personality Traits. François Mairesse and Marilyn Walker. Computational Linguistics, 2011.
• An Application of Reinforcement Learning to Dialogue Strategy Selection in a Spoken Dialogue System for Email. Marilyn Walker. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, JAIR, Vol 12., pp. 387-416, 2000.
• Towards Personality-Based User Adaptation: Psychologically Informed Stylistic Language Generation. François Mairesse and Marilyn Walker. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, 20:3, pages 227-278, 2010.
• An Unsupervised Method for Learning Generation Dictionaries for Spoken Dialogue Systems by Mining User Reviews. Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Marilyn Walker and Rashmi Prasad. Journal of ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing, 2007.
• Learning Content Selection Rules for Generating Object Descriptions in Dialogue. Pam Jordan and Marilyn Walker. In Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Vol 24, pp. 157-194, 2005.