Welcome to my website!

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the International Computer Science Institute and the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of California at Berkeley, working with Srini Narayanan and George Lakoff.

My research focuses on computational modeling of human creativity and metaphor. I am looking at this problem from three different perspectives: that of linguistics, i.e. how creative thought is expressed in natural languages; that of computer science, i.e. how the computational mechanisms of creative thought can be simulated; and that of cognitive science, i.e. to which extent this simulation replicates the computation process employed by the human brain.

I also now lead the new Metaphor Extraction research team at ICSI. Our goal is to create robust and accurate tools that identify metaphorical expressions in unrestricted text using statistical methods.

Before coming to Berkeley I was a Research Associate at RCEAL and the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, funded by the EU PANACEA project and working with Anna Korhonen on computational lexical semantics.

I received my PhD from the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in 2011. My research supervisors were Simone Teufel and Anna Korhonen. My studies were funded by the ORS award, Cambridge Trusts and Google and I am a member of Pembroke College.

Contact me at

katia @ berkeley.edu

News!

Beata Beigman Klebanov, Joel Tetrault, Zornitsa Kozareva and I are organising The First Workshop on Metaphor in NLP, co-located with NAACL-HLT 2013 in Atlanta! And we have a very exciting programme! You can register here.