Sharon Caraballo

Title: Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs
EMail: scarabal@gmu.edu
Office: Science and Technology 2, Room 168C
Phone: 703-993-1497

Dr. Sharon Caraballo grew up in Rahway, New Jersey and received her B.A. in computer science from Rutgers University. She received her Sc.M. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Brown University. Her research is in the area of statistical natural language processing, looking at the question of what linguistic phenomena can be discovered using only a large text corpus. Her work has explored various facets of language learning, primarily focusing on learning semantic properties of nouns. In her dissertation work, she developed a method for automatically constructing a hypernym (or “IS-A”) hierarchy of nouns using a large text corpus and no other sources of linguistic information. Prior to that, she worked on the problem of increasing the speed of statistical parsing methods by assigning an appropriate figure of merit to candidate constituents.

Dr. Caraballo served as Clare Boothe Luce Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University before joining the faculty of George Mason University in 2004 as Associate Director of IT Undergraduate Programs for the School of IT&E. Dr. Caraballo was appointed Associate Chair of the Department of Applied Information Technology when the department was established in 2005.