Ekaterina Kochmar

Prior to joining MBZUAI, Professor Kochmar worked as a Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Bath (2021–2023) where she was part of the AI research group. Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the ALTA (Automated Language Teaching and Assessment) Institute at University of Cambridge focusing on the development of educational applications for second language learners.

She conducts research at the intersection of artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and intelligent tutoring systems. Her research contributed to the building of Read & Improve, a readability tool for non-native readers of English, and to the building of Korbi, a dialogue-based intelligent tutoring system capable of providing learners with high-quality, interactive and personalized education in STEM subjects.

Professor Kochmar is a co-founder and the chief scientific officer of https://www.korbit.ai/, focusing on building an AI-powered dialogue-based tutoring system capable of providing learners with high-quality, interactive, and personalized education in STEM subjects.

Professor Kochmar is the President of the ACL Special Interest Group on Educational Applications (SIGEDU), and of the International Alliance to Advance Learning in the Digital Era (IAALDE). She is an area chair in NLP Applications for ACL 2023 and an action editor for the ACL Rolling Review; prior to that she served as an area chair for EMNLP 2022 and ACL 2023, and was part of the programme committees of the top-ranked international conferences in the field, including ACL,NAACL,EMNLP, AAAI, COLING, BEA, LREC, *SEM, as well as multiple ACL workshops.

• Ph.D. in natural language processing from University of Cambridge, England
• Master’s in advanced computer science from University of Cambridge, England
• Master’s in computational linguistics from University of Tuebingen, Germany
• Diploma in mathematical and applied linguistics from St. Petersburg State University, Russia

Kochmar has (co-)authored more than 30 internationally peer-reviewed research papers and published a book titled Getting Started with Natural Language Processing in 2022.

• Ekaterina Kochmar (2022). Getting Started with Natural Language Processing. Manning Publications, ISBN 9781617296765
• Devang Kulshreshtha, Muhammad Shayan, Robert Belfer, Siva Reddy, Iulian Vlad Serban, and Ekaterina Kochmar (2022). Few-shot Question Generation for Personalized Feedback in Intelligent Tutoring Systems. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems (PAIS 2022)
• Ekaterina Kochmar, Dung Do Vu, Robert Belfer, Varun Gupta, Iulian Vlad Serban, and Joelle Pineau (2021). Automated Generation of Personalized Pedagogical Interventions in Intelligent Tutoring Systems. In International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (IJAIED)
• Sian Gooding, Ekaterina Kochmar, Seid Muhie Yimam, and Chris Biemann (2021). Word Complexity is in the Eye of the Beholder. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2021)
• Matt Grenander, Robert Belfer, Ekaterina Kochmar, Iulian Serban, François St-Hilaire, and Jackie Cheung (2021). Deep Discourse Analysis for Generating Personalized Feedback in Intelligent Tutor Systems. In Proceedings of the 11th Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI-21)