Professor, Department of Linguistics
Director, Discourse
Processing Lab
Associate Member, School of Computing Science
Robert C. Brown (RCB) Building 8109
8888 University Drive
Simon Fraser
University
Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canada
My name is pronounced like this
and transcribed like this:
['ma̯ite taβo'aða]
/'maite tabo'ada/
I am originally from Madrid, Spain, and I graduated with a Licenciatura in English Philology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 1993, including a year as an exchange student at Stetson University in Florida, USA . A Licenciatura is a five-year degree, roughly the equivalent of a BA+MA in North America or in the current European (Bologna) system. At the Universidad Complutense I took part in GIST, a European Union funded project in Natural Language Generation, with Julia Lavid as the local PI.
After that degree, I started a PhD in English Linguistics at the same university, but took a break to complete an M.Sc. in Computational Linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. At CMU, I was part of the JANUS project, a speech translation system at the Language Technologies Institute, working with Lori Levin and Alon Lavie. For my thesis, I implemented a system to keep track of context and to improve the output of machine translation.
I continued the PhD, which I completed in 2001, also under the supervision of Julia Lavid. In my dissertation, I examined task-oriented conversations in English and Spanish, and showed how they are jointly constructed to be coherent. I analyzed the conversations in terms of coherence, using Rhetorical Structure Theory; in terms of cohesion, applying Halliday and Hasan's model of cohesion; and in terms of thematic relations, using definitions from Systemic Functional Linguistics.
Before finishing my PhD, I moved to Canada, and I held several limited-term positions at the University of Alberta in Edmonton: teaching in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies and the Department of Linguistics, and a postdoctoral research position in the Department of Computing Science, working with Renée Elio on software agent communication.
In 2000 I moved to Vancouver, to work for a now defunct technology company, MindfulEye Systems. I was in charge of developing a system to track opinions expressed online. In 2001 I came to Simon Fraser University, where I was first Assistant Professor (2001-2007), Associate Professor (2007-2014), and now Full Professor in the Department of Linguistics. At SFU, I am also an Associate Member of the Cognitive Science Program and the School of Computing Science. I direct the Discourse Processing Lab.
For further details, you can check a full curriculum vitae (in pdf), or consult my research, teaching and publications page. The lab also has a GitHub page.