Her research interests include using expressive grammar formalisms for statistical parsing and grammar induction, applying parsing algorithms to model protein folding, and, more recently, developing models of automatically describing images in natural language. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Mark Steedman, and did a postdoc with Aravind Joshi at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a current member of the Computational Linguistics editorial board, was on the Senior Program Committee for NAACL-HLT 2007, and is a regular member of the program committee for the various ACL conferences. She has participated in ACL/EACL/NAACL student research workshops as author, student organizer and faculty adviser, and was a member of the first EACL student board.