I received a B.S. in applied mathematics (computer science) from Carnegie Mellon University in 1987, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1989 and 1994 respectively. In Fall 1994, I joined the computer science faculty at the University of Utah. After many years at Utah, I am thrilled to be joining the University of Arizona! My primary research area is natural language processing (NLP), and I am interested in artificial intelligence more broadly. I am fascinated by language and how effortlessly humans communicate, despite rampant ambiguity and assumptions based on common sense knowledge. I have wide-ranging research interests, including information extraction (especially events), affective text analysis (recognizing emotional reactions, explicit and implicit), commonsense knowledge acquisition, semantics, discourse, and pragmatics (the intent behind what we say). I also enjoy working on application-oriented NLP, which is where the rubber meets the road and the limitations of current technology become apparent.