Thamar Solorio

Senior Director, Graduate Student Affairs, and Professor of Natural Language Processing

Research interests

Solorio’s research focuses on information extraction (structured prediction) problems, multilingual models, with a special emphasis on mixed language settings, low resource NLP, and more recently, multimodal content understanding.

Email

Prior to joining MBZUAI, Solorio was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Houston (UH) and the Director and Founder of the RiTUAL Lab at UH. She holds graduate degrees in computer science from the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica, in Puebla, Mexico. Solorio received an NSF CAREER award for her work on authorship attribution in 2014 – a very prestigious award for young investigators from the National Science Foundation. She is also a recipient of the 2014 Emerging Leader ABIE Award in Honor of Denice Denton. She is currently serving a second term as an elected board member of the North American Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics and was PC co-chair for NAACL 2019. She is also co-Editor-in-Chief for the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) system and member of the ARR advisory board. Solorio has a US patent awarded in 2022 for her work on recommendation systems for books. Before joining UH, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
  • Ph.D. in computer science, National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics, in Puebla, Mexico
  • Master’s in computer science, National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics, in Puebla, Mexico
  • Bachelor of Science in computer systems engineering, Autonomous University of Chihuahua, Chihuahua, Chihuahua, Mexico
  • Editor in Chief of the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) initiative, 2022-
  • ARR Advisory board member
  • Elected board member to the North American Chapter of Association for Computational Linguistics
  • UHCS Academic Excellence Award, COSC Department Award,  Fall 2017
  • CRA-W Mid Career Mentoring Workshop, Travel Grant, June 2015
  • 2014 Denice Denton Emerging Leader ABIE Award, Recognition by the Anita Borg Institute, Fall 2014
  • Research Visit for Distinguished Researchers, UPV, Spain, Fall 2011
  • Anthony Barnard Award, CIS, UAB Fall 2011

She has coauthored more than 200 publications in a wide range of NLP topics:

  • L. Fernando Pardo-Sixtos, A. Pastor López-Monroy, Mahsa Shafaei, and Thamar Solorio. Hierarchical attention and transformers for automatic movie rating. Expert Systems with Applications, 209:118164, 2022.
  • Siva Uday Sampreeth Chebolu, Paolo Rosso, Sudipta Kar, and Thamar Solorio. Survey on aspect category detection. ACM Comput. Surv., May 2022. 2022
  • Shuguang Chen, Leonardo Neves, and Thamar Solorio. Style transfer as data augmentation: A case study on named entity recognition. In EMNLP 2022.
  • Genta Winata, Shijie Wu, Mayank Kulkarni, Thamar Solorio, and Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro. Cross-lingual few-shot learning on unseen languages. In AACL IJCNLP 2022, Virtual. Association for Computational Linguistics.
  • Shuguang Chen, Gustavo Aguilar, Leonardo Neves, and Thamar Solorio. Data augmentation for cross-domain named entity recognition. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5346–5356, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, November 2021. Association for Computational Linguistics.
  • Yigeng Zhang, Mahsa Shafaei, Fabio Gonzalez, and Thamar Solorio. From none to severe: Predicting severity in movie scripts. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 3951–3956, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, November 2021. Association for Computational Linguistics.

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