Bonnie J. Dorr, Ph.D.

Bonnie J. Dorr, Ph.D.

Professor

Bio

Bonnie J. Dorr is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Florida and member of the Florida Institute for National Security (FINS). Dr. Dorr leads the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Research Laboratory. Her research and project management experience includes deep-language understanding and semantics, large-scale multilingual processing, summarization, and explainable AI and NLP. She has carried out seminal work in cross-language divergence detection, machine translation, paraphrasing and automatic evaluation metrics.

Together with her colleagues and students, Dr. Dorr has established the new field of Cyber-NLP, bringing together expertise at the intersection of cyber, social computing, AI, and NLP. Her interests focus on cyber-event extraction and natural language understanding for detecting attacks, discerning intentions of attackers, thwarting social engineering attacks, and detecting stances and other indicators of influence campaigns. As PI of an IARPA CAUSE team (ELLIPSE), she has focused on generation of warning narratives to security analysts. She has led and currently leads projects in several recent DARPA programs including SocialSim (SimON), SIFT (PERFECTA), ASED (PANACEA), ASIST (PEPT and UPSTAGE), and INCAS (RADII).

Prior to UF, Dr. Dorr was Associate Director and Senior Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, where she continues to hold an affiliate Senior Research Scientist position. She was also on the faculty at the University of Maryland, where she is Professor Emerita in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and the Department of Computer Science. She was an associate dean of the College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences, and co-founded the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Laboratory. She was also principal scientist for two years at the Johns Hopkins University Human Language Technology Center of Excellence.

In 2011 she became a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), overseeing research in human language technology. Her significant DARPA projects include Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT), Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT), Multilingual Automatic Document Classification, Analysis, and Translation (MADCAT), and Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech (RATS).

Professor Dorr is a Sloan Fellow, an NSF Presidential Faculty (PECASE) Fellow, and a former president of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She has served on the Executive Council of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and on the Executive Board of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). She was elected AAAI Fellow in 2013, ACL Fellow in 2016, and ACM Fellow in 2020, and graduated in Class XXXIII of Leadership Florida in 2015. She was named by DARPA to the Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study Group in 2020.

Primary Research Area

Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing

Research Areas

Multilingual Processing, Social Computing, CyberNLP, Explainable AI and NLP

Education

Ph.D., Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
S.M., Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
B.A., Computer Science, Boston University

Research Interests

Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Human-Centered Computing, Multilingual Processing, Social Computing, and CyberNLP (at the cross-section of cyber security and natural language processing).

Publications

See full list here.

Awards & Distinctions

  • Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, conferred for “human-centered and linguistically inspired approaches to natural language processing”, 2021.
  • Ollin International Women’s Day Honoree as a Woman in the Sciences, Ocala, FL, March 21, 2021.
  • One of 30 scientists named by DARPA to the Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study Group, 2020-2023.
  • Elected member of the Board of Directors for the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society (FLAIRS) (and editor of proceedings): 2019-present
  • One of 20 scientists selected as an invited participant at the First Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and NASA Science Technology Planning, related to the upcoming decadal survey, 2020.
  • Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics, conferred for “significant contributions to machine translation, summarization and human evaluation”, 2016.
  • Selected as one of 55 Leadership Florida members of Class XXXIII, 2014.
  • Fellow of the International Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, conferred for “significant contributions to natural language understanding and representation, and development of the widely recognized methods for interlingual machine translation”, 2013.
  • TERp measure recognized internationally by National Institute of Standards and Technology as top MT metric out of 38 submitted, October 2008.
  • Inventor of Year: OASYS, March 2007 (with VS Subrahmanian and colleagues).
  • Best Paper Award, North Am Assoc for Computational Ling (w/ Rosti, Ayan, Xiang, Matsoukas, and Schwartz), 2007.
  • Selected as one of 8 top leaders in “”Universal Translation” by Technology Review (MIT Alum Magazine), February 2004.
  • Topiary headline-generation system placed first out of 40 systems in National Institute of Standards and Technology DUC Conference, 2003.
  • CMPS Postdoctoral Alumni Award, 2002.
  • Recipient of National Science Foundation Presidential Faculty Fellowship (PECASE) Award, conferred by the US President in 1996, for “original contributions to computer science and linguistics, especially the design and implementation of natural language processing systems for machine translation and foreign language tutoring and to the development of a laboratory facility that increases interaction among students, faculty, and researchers in linguistics, philosophy, and information systems.” University of Maryland, 1997–1999.

Contact Information

Email: bonniejdorr@ufl.edu

Website(s):
http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~bonniejdorr/
NLP&Culture Laboratory

Office: 226E MAE

Lab Room: 206 MAE

Mailing Address:

Prof. Bonnie J. Dorr
P.O. Box 116120,
Gainesville, FL 32611