Rada Mihalcea
Rada Mihalcea works on natural language processing and computational social science. She earned doctorates in computer science at Southern Methodist University in 2001 and linguistics at Oxford in 2010. At North Texas, she developed TextRank with Paul Tarau, applying graph ranking to keyword and sentence extraction. She joined Michigan in 2013 and became professor in 2015. She became a collegiate professor in 2020. She supports social applications of language technology and the ACL Year Round Mentorship program.
- Now at
- University of Michigan
- Works
- 610
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.
Timeline
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2001–2002
Computer science foundation
Mihalcea earned a computer science and engineering doctorate at Southern Methodist University in 2001. She became an assistant professor at the University of North Texas in 2002. This early career stage led to her later work in lexical meaning and multilingual language processing.
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2004
TextRank
Mihalcea and Paul Tarau introduced TextRank at EMNLP in 2004. Their method represents text as a graph and lets connected words or sentences contribute to one another’s importance scores. They tested unsupervised keyword and sentence extraction. The work adapts graph ranking ideas to language.
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2010–2015
Language and university roles
She received a second doctorate, in linguistics, from Oxford in 2010. She joined the University of Michigan as an associate professor in 2013 and became professor in 2015. Her research includes lexical semantics, multilingual natural language processing, and computational social science, bringing linguistic questions into computational methods.
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2020
A collegiate professorship
Michigan’s Regents approved her appointment as Janice M. Jenkins Collegiate Professor in March 2020, effective from 1 March 2020 through February 2025. She also directed the Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab from 2017.
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As of October 2026
Social applications and mentorship
She promotes language technology for social benefit and supports the shared ACL Year Round Mentorship program.
Sources and credits
Photo: web.eecs.umich.edu; Rada Mihalcea; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: web.eecs.umich.edu. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.