Amy Weinberg

Amy Weinberg is the former executive director of the Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL).

Weinberg specializes in researching topics at the intersection of computer science, psychology, and linguistics. She has made substantial contributions in machine translation and sentiment analysis, with particular emphasis on marrying statistical models and linguistic theory. Weinberg has also proposed a number of methods to decrease the developmental cost of structurally driven translation systems.

In addition to work at the interface of linguistics and language engineering, Weinberg has worked on topics in theoretical linguistics and cognitive science. The goal of this research is to use modeling techniques to help understand the computational procedures that underlie real-time language understanding. Her recent work involves uncovering universal principles grounded in linguistic theory that apply across languages of The world irrespective of word order.

She was previously an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and UMIACS until 2004, when she joined CASL as its area director for technology use.

Weinberg joined the university’s Division of Research in 2007, where she supported the University of Maryland National Security Advisory Board and other outreach efforts. In 2008, she earned the rank of professor of linguistics and was cross-appointed to the Department of Computer Science. Weinberg served as a director of the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Lab until her return to CASL as its deputy executive director in 2010.

She is also the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters.

Weinberg received her doctorate in linguistics and philosophy from MIT in 1988.