She is the founder and director of the Research in Text Understanding and Analysis of Language (RiTUAL) group at UH. Her main research interests include stylistic modeling of text, syntactic analysis of mixed language data, language assessment, and information extraction from social media data. She has M.S. and PhD degrees in Computer Science from INAOE, Puebla, Mexico. The Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation currently fund her research program. She is the recipient of a CAREER award for her work in authorship analysis, and the 2014 Denice Denton Emerging Leaders ABIE Award. She serves as editorial board member for the Journal on Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and the Computer Speech and Language Journal.