Lori Levin
Lori Levin researches computational linguistics and language technologies for languages with limited resources. She earned her MIT linguistics doctorate and began machine-translation work in 1986. Her 2011 seminar examined semantic information in statistical translation. With collaborators she published a 2020 Mapudungun corpus resource containing transcribed and translated conversations for speech and translation experiments. She is a co-founder and co-chair of NACLO. ACL elected her a Fellow in 2025.
- Works
- 141
- Citations
- 2,658
- h-index
- 27
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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1986
Linguistics and machine translation
Levin earned her MIT linguistics doctorate in 1986 and began machine-translation work that year at the Center for Machine Translation. Her research spans European, Asian, Native American and African languages. Linguistic structure is a central part of her approach to language technology.
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2011
Semantic information in translation
In a 2011 seminar, Levin described adding information about modality to a syntactically augmented translation system. The example studied Urdu-to-English translation by giving parse-tree categories more specific semantic labels. It illustrates an approach combining linguistic representations with statistical translation.
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2020
A shared Mapudungun resource
Levin and six collaborators published a resource for computational experiments on Mapudungun in 2020. The resource contains 142 hours of transcribed conversations translated into Spanish, with annotations and baseline speech and translation tasks. The collaboration involved CMU, Universidad de la Frontera and Chile’s Ministry of Education.
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2025
Recognition and language education
ACL elected Levin a Fellow in 2025. She is a co-founder and co-chair of NACLO, a computational-linguistics competition. Her research and teaching connect linguistic analysis, corpus resources and learning about language.
Sources and credits
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