Katrin Erk

Katrin Erk is a professor in the Linguistics and Computer Science departments at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Previously she was a professor in the Linguistics and Computer Science departments at the University of Texas in Austin. Katrin studied computer science in Koblenz, and received her doctorate in computer science at Saarland University.

Katrin Erk's research is in computational linguistics, in particular semantics, the study of meaning. At the word level, she studies flexible, cognitively plausible representations of meaning, and the ways in which they are constrained by context. At the sentence level, she explores frameworks that can draw inferences both based on sentence structure and flexible word meanings. She also studies narrative schemas (recurring patterns of events), and their importance both for word meaning and inferences.