Ellen Marie Voorhees (born March 13, 1958) is an American computer scientist known for her work in

document retrieval Document retrieval is defined as the matching of some stated user query against a set of free-text records. These records could be any type of mainly natural language, unstructured text, such as newspaper articles, real estate records or paragraphs ...

information retrieval Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an Information needs, information need. The information need can be specified in the form ...

, and

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

. She works in the retrieval group at the

National Institute of Standards and Technology The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into Outline of p ...

(NIST).

Education and career

Voorhees was born in

Bensalem Township, Pennsylvania Bensalem Township is a township in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, United States. The township borders the northeastern section of Philadelphia and includes the communities of Andalusia, Bensalem, Bridgewater, Cornwells Heights, Eddington, Flush ...

, and was the 1976

valedictorian Valedictorian is an academic title for the class rank, highest-performing student of a graduation, graduating class of an academic institution in the United States. The valedictorian is generally determined by an academic institution's grade poin ...

at Bensalem High School. She did her undergraduate studies at

Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a Public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related Land-grant university, land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsyl ...

, graduating in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in computer science. She attended

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

where she received her master's degree and then went on to complete her Ph.D. in 1985. Her dissertation, ''The Effectiveness and Efficiency of Agglomerative Hierarchic Clustering in Document Retrieval'', was supervised by

Gerard Salton Gerard A. "Gerry" Salton (8 March 1927 – 28 August 1995) was a professor of computer science at Cornell University. Salton was perhaps the leading computer scientist working in the field of information retrieval during his time, and "the father ...

. Prior to joining NIST she was a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, NJ, where her work on intelligent agents applied to information access resulted in numerous patents. A dedicated researcher and prolific writer, she is the author of hundreds of technical papers.

Recognition

Voorhees was elected as an

ACM Fellow ACM Fellowship is an award and fellowship that recognises outstanding members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The title of ACM Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals ...

in 2018 for "contributions in evaluation of information retrieval, question answering, and other language technologies". Voorhees is a member of the

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international Learned society, scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public under ...

and the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), and has been elected as a fellow of the Washington Academy of Sciences. She has published numerous articles on information retrieval techniques and evaluation methodologies and serves on the review boards of several journals and conferences. In 2023 Voorhees was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science Degree from the

University of Glasgow The University of Glasgow (abbreviated as ''Glas.'' in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals; ) is a Public university, public research university in Glasgow, Scotland. Founded by papal bull in , it is the List of oldest universities in continuous ...

in recognition of her body of work in the evaluation of information retrieval, question answering, and other language technologies. In 2024 Voorhees received the

Gerard Salton Award The Gerard Salton Award is presented by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) every three years to an individual who has made "significant, sustained and continuing contributions to re ...

, a lifetime achievement award given by ACM's

Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval SIGIR is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval. The scope of the group's specialty is the theory and application of computers to the acquisition, organization, storage, retrieval and distribut ...

(SIGIR).

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Voorhees, Ellen 1958 births Living people American computer scientists American women computer scientists Pennsylvania State University alumni Cornell University alumni 2018 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery National Institute of Standards and Technology people Natural language processing researchers 21st-century American women