Swapna Somasundaran is a director in the AI Research Labs in the Research & Development division at ETS. Her expertise is in natural language processing (NLP) and computational linguistics. Her interests include narrative analysis, opinion analysis, discourse, and semantics. At ETS, she is building and employing these technologies in automated scoring of test items and in automated content generation.
Somasundaran has numerous publications in top peer-reviewed international artificial intelligence (AI)/NLP conferences (e.g., Association for Computational Linguistics, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) and holds several patents in educational and healthcare domains. She has been a reviewer and program committee member for conferences and workshops in NLP for more than 14 years. She has organized international NLP workshops and has served on organizing committees of various international conferences and as a reviewer for journals.
Before joining ETS, Somasundaran was a research scientist at Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, where she built systems to perform information retrieval and relationship mining. Her other industrial positions include software consultant at IBM, where she contributed to the IBM UIMA project (now known as IBM Watson), and software engineer at Tata Infotech Ltd., where she built NLP question answering tools. She received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh, an M.S.E., also in computer science, from the Johns Hopkins University and a B.E. in electronics engineering from the Mumbai University (India).