Michael Flor is a computational linguist. He earned a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology with specialization in psycholinguistics from Tel Aviv University, Israel. He has also worked as a computational linguist for start-up companies developing natural language processing algorithms for content personalization and search engine applications.
He joined ETS in 2005. He is a research scientist in the Research & Development division, where he specializes in research focused on automatic processing of text data, combining linguistic, statistical, and cognitive approaches. He has contributed to the development of several ETS technologies including the e-rater® automated scoring engine and the TextEvaluator® text complexity estimation. His current research interests focus on automatic generation of vocabulary items and reading-comprehension questions from text.
Flor received an ETS Presidential Award in 2011. He is the author and coauthor of 10 U.S. patents in the areas of language technologies. He has served as a reviewer for several international conferences (including Association for Computational Linguistics [ACL], European chaper of the ACL, North American chapter of the ACL, and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing) and for top-tier research journals and is a long-time committee member for international workshops in the areas of figurative language and computational linguistics for education.