Jean Carletta

Timeline

1. 1992

   A doctorate at Edinburgh

   She completes a PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1992 under advisor Christopher Mellish, with the dissertation Risk Taking and Recovery in Task-Oriented Dialogue.

2. 1996–1997

   The kappa statistic paper

   In 1996, she publishes "Assessing Agreement on Classification Tasks: The Kappa Statistic" in Computational Linguistics, arguing that the field would be better off adopting techniques from content analysis such as the kappa statistic. In 1997, she coauthors "The Reliability of a Dialogue Structure Coding Scheme" with Amy Isard, Stephen Isard, Jacqueline C. Kowtko, Gwyneth Doherty-Sneddon and Anne H. Anderson.

3. 2003

   The NITE XML Toolkit

   In 2003, she coauthors "The NITE XML Toolkit: flexible annotation for multi-modal language data" with Stefan Evert, Uli Heid, Jonathan Kilgour, Judy Robertson and Holger Voormann. The toolkit gives developers library support for tools that handle code sets with both timings and structure.

4. 2005

   The AMI Meeting Corpus

   In 2005, she and the AMI team publish "The AMI Meeting Corpus: A Pre-announcement", which introduces the Augmented Multi-Party Interaction (AMI) Corpus. The corpus holds 100 hours of synchronized recordings from special instrumented meeting rooms, with transcripts and large portions annotated for named entities, dialogue acts, summaries, gaze and head movement.

5. 2012

   Co-editing Multimodal Signal Processing

   In 2012, Cambridge University Press publishes Multimodal Signal Processing: Human Interactions in Meetings, which she co-edits with Steve Renals, Hervé Bourlard and Andrei Popescu-Belis. She and Mike Lincoln of the University of Edinburgh write its chapter on data collection.

6. 2015

   A Ten-Year Technical Impact Award

   In 2015, the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction gives its Ten-Year Technical Impact Award to her and the AMI team for the 2005 AMI Meeting Corpus paper.

7. 2021

   A Test-of-Time Award

   In 2021, the Association for Computational Linguistics gives its 25-year Test-of-Time Paper Award to her 1996 kappa statistic paper. The paper corrects a common but misleading statistical practice, and her field begins to require assessments of how variability in subjective analyses could bias the claims made for their results.

8. As of October 2026

   Cyber resilience at St Andrews

   She is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, with work on how Scotland's academic community contributes to national cyber security and resilience. She serves as Cyber Resilience Impact Officer at St Andrews and sits on the ScotlandIS Cyber Cluster Advisory Group.