Previously, she was a director of research and principal research scientist at Yahoo Labs, a principal member of technical staff at AT&T Labs - Research, and an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Stony Brook University. Her research interests center on natural language processing and its applications, in particular topics related to text analytics, discourse, dialog and natural language generation. She holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Rochester. She has authored over 90 papers on natural language processing and is co-inventor on over twenty patents and patent applications. She is also a board member of the Computing Research Association subcommittee on the status of women in the profession (CRA-W).