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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 unstructured text, such as newspaper articles, real estate records or paragraphs in a manual. User ...
,
information retrieval Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the process of obtaining information system resources that are relevant to an information need from a collection of those resources. Searches can be based on full-text or other co ...
, and
natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...
. 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 physical sci ...
(NIST).


Education and career

Voorhees was born in
Bensalem Township, Pennsylvania Bensalem Township is a township in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The township borders the northeastern section of Philadelphia and includes the communities of Andalusia, Bensalem, Bridgewater, Cornwells Heights, Eddington, Flushing, Oakford, S ...
, and was the 1976
valedictorian Valedictorian is an academic title for the highest-performing student of a graduating class of an academic institution. The valedictorian is commonly determined by a numerical formula, generally an academic institution's grade point average (GPA) ...
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 Pennsylvan ...
, graduating in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in computer science. She went to
Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teac ...
for graduate school, earning a master's degree and completing 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 in Nuremberg – 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, an ...
. She worked as a researcher for Siemens before joining NIST.


Recognition

Voorhees was elected as an
ACM Fellow ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia Computing ...
in 2018 for "contributions in evaluation of information retrieval, question answering, and other language technologies".


References


External links

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