Marilyn Walker
Marilyn Walker studies conversational agents and ways to generate and evaluate language in dialogue. Walker received a University of Pennsylvania doctorate in 1993. Her thesis studied informational redundancy and resource bounds in dialogue, connecting language use with the limits of conversational systems. Walker worked at AT&T Labs Research from 1996 to 2003 in speech processing software and technology research. Her career includes computational dialogue and language generation research.
- Works
- 261
- Citations
- 10,851
- h-index
- 51
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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1993
Doctoral work on dialogue
Walker received a University of Pennsylvania doctorate in 1993. Her thesis studied informational redundancy and resource bounds in dialogue, connecting language use with the limits of conversational systems.
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1996–2003
Speech and dialogue research
Walker worked at AT&T Labs Research from 1996 to 2003 in speech processing software and technology research. Her career includes computational dialogue and language generation research.
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2003–2009
Cognitive systems at Sheffield
Walker was a professor of computer science and head of the Cognitive Systems Group at Sheffield from 2003 to 2009. She moved to UC Santa Cruz in 2009.
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2011
Generating linguistic personality
Walker and François Mairesse co-authored Controlling User Perceptions of Linguistic Style: Trainable Generation of Personality Traits in Computational Linguistics in 2011. The work examines expressive language generation in dialogue.
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2016
Research recognition
ACL elected Marilyn Walker as a Fellow in 2016.
Sources and credits
Photo: users.soe.ucsc.edu; Marilyn Walker profile photograph; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: users.soe.ucsc.edu. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.