She received her B.S. and M.S. in Civil Engineering, Infrastructure Planning and Management from Stanford University in 1980, her M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford in 1985, and her Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems from the University of Pittsburgh in 1998. She worked at Symantec in the early 1980's, at Digital Equipment Corporation's System Research Center (1985-88), at Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Philosophy (1988-89) and Center for Machine Translation (1994-99), and at Carnegie Technology Education (1999-2000). Her research interests include interlingua- and example-based machine translation, computational morphology (especially of Arabic), and intelligent computer-assisted language learning. She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation International Fellowship in Morocco for English-Arabic machine translation.