Overview
Dr. McCracken is currently a Research Associate Professor who also teaches courses in the iSchool. Her general research interests are in applying the principles and tools of computational linguistics to making information accessible and understandable for people. Recent research projects are in methods of machine learning for natural language processing and in metadata extraction for access to museum and library materials.
Dr. McCracken was formerly in the Center for Natural Language Processing where she was a project leader supervising research teams for government grants and business contracts. Past positions also include being a research scientist at the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University, specializing in parallel computing languages, and as faculty in the School of Computer and Information Science at Syracuse University.
Research Interests
Dr. McCracken’s general research interests are in applying the principles and tools of computational linguistics to making information accessible and understandable for people. She has participated in a wide variety of natural language processing (NLP) applications through her experience at the Center for Natural Language Processing (CNLP), including information extraction, question answering, information retrieval, knowledge representation and semantic role labeling.
Dr. McCracken’s past research results include new methods for machine learning for NLP, for which work she received a Best Paper Award from the IEA/AIE conference in 2008. She is currently the PI on a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services with CNLP to develop software for metadata extraction of museum and library materials.
Areas of Research: Computational Linguistics; Data Mining; Machine Learning; Knowledge Representation; Information Extraction; Information Retrieval; Applications of Natural Language Processing
Teaching Interests
Dr. McCracken’s teaching focuses on natural language processing, data mining for enterprise applications, and information retrieval. She also teaches an introductory course in computer programming for undergraduates and is currently engaged in curriculum development for that course.
Personal Interests
Outdoor activities include hiking, biking and morris dancing. Indoor activities include cooking and sewing.