Welcome
I am Darla Magdalene Shockley, and I have been a PhD student in the Computer Science & Engineering Department at The Ohio State University since September, 2005. During my first year, I was a University Fellow, followed by two quarters of working as an RA for my previous advisor, Dr. Donna K. Byron, funded by an NIH grant. Now I am teaching CSE 201, Elementary Computer Programming (taught in Java 1.5). My major area of study is Artificial Intelligence, specifically Natural Language Processing. My minor areas of study are Linguistics and Systems (databases, IR, etc.).
My research interests within NLP have been quite varied. I have collaborated with Dr. Donna Byron on psycholinguistics research which has implications for computational models used in dialog systems, have worked with Laura Stoia and Preethi Jyothi on natural language generation and corpus linguistics, and with Tim Miller on statistical language modeling. I have recently begun work in information retrieval.
Current Research
I am currently working with Dr. Hui Fang in information retrieval. My work thus far has been in comparing different retrieval functions, and determining which query features drive performance differences. I am also beginning work with Tim Weale on a project which attempts to integrate word relatedness metrics into clustering algorithms, investigates different user interfaces to clustered search results, and attempts to integrate negative feedback for search results using clustering.