Research Associate

Jena Hwang is a Research Associate in natural language processing at the IHMC Ocala. Before joining IHMC, she served as a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the West at the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB), focusing on lexical resource creation for the Arapaho language. She has also taught for the Department of Linguistics at the UCB. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Linguistics and Cognitive Science in at the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB), and her B.A. in Computer Science and B.S. in Biochemistry at Calvin College.

Jena’s research interests lie at the intersection of event semantics and natural language processing. Her work has focused on stepping beyond strictly compositional interpretations of meaning, to encompass contextually driven interpretations of events occasioned by the identification of phrasal-level constructions. Through her research, she has worked extensively with the argument structure representations and event descriptions in various lexical resources such as VerbNet and PropBank, and has further worked in adapting these representations to the idiosyncratic linguistic aspects of languages such as Arabic (Modern Standard) and Hindi.