She obtained her doctorate in 2003 from the University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science. She has a Masters in Computer Science and Engineering from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Her research interests include lexical semantics, information retrieval, information extraction, text classification, and natural language generation. She organized the 2010 NAACL workshop on Computational Approaches to Analysis and Generation of Emotion in Text, and two EACL workshops in 2006 and 2012. She was publicity co-chair for the HLT-NAACL 2009 conference. She was program co-chair for several conferences, including the Canadian Conference for Artificial Intelligence AI 2012.