About

Katrin Erk is a professor in the Linguistics and Computer Science departments at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research expertise is in the area of computational linguistics, especially semantics. Her work is on distributed, flexible approaches to describing word meaning, and on integrating them with representations at the sentence or discourse level.  At the word level, she studies flexible representations of meaning, and the ways in which they are constrained by context. At the sentence level, she explores frameworks that can draw inferences both based on sentence structure and flexible word meanings. She also studies narrative schemas, the ways in which they influence word meaning, and the inferences that they afford. Katrin Erk completed her dissertation on tree description languages and ellipsis at Saarland University in 2002. After that, she was a postdoc in the computational linguistics department at Saarland University from 2002 to 2006. In 2006, she joined the Linguistics Department at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2025, she moved to the University of Massachusetts Amherst.