Nancy McCracken

Dr. McCracken is currently a Research Associate Professor who also teaches courses in the iSchool.  Her general research interests are in applying the principles and tools of computational linguistics to making information accessible and understandable for people.  Recent research projects includes a study of the language patterns of using Twitter to engage in politics and an NSF funded project for using natural language processing and machine learning to assist social scientists in content analysis of text.

Dr. McCracken was formerly in the Center for Natural Language Processing where she was a project leader supervising research teams for government grants and business contracts.  Past positions also include being a research scientist at the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University, specializing in parallel computing languages, and as faculty in the School of Computer and Information Science at Syracuse University.

Research Interests

Dr. McCracken’s general research interests are in applying the principles and tools of computational linguistics to making information accessible and understandable for people.  She has participated in a wide variety of natural language processing (NLP) applications through her experience at the Center for Natural Language Processing (CNLP), including information extraction, question answering, information retrieval, knowledge representation and semantic role labeling.

Dr. McCracken’s past research results include new methods for machine learning for NLP, for which work she received a Best Paper Award from the IEA/AIE conference in 2008.   She recently served as the PI on a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services with CNLP to develop software for metadata extraction of museum and library materials. 

Dr. McCracken is currently the PI on an NSF funded project for using natural language processing and machine learning to assist social scientists in content analysis of text.  A second current research area is looking at language in social media and particularly looked at the language patterns of using Twitter to mobilize people to engage in politics

Areas of Research:  Computational Linguistics;  Data Mining;  Machine Learning;  Analysis of Language in Social Media; Knowledge Representation;  Information Extraction;  Information Retrieval;  Applications of Natural Language Processing

Teaching Interests

Dr. McCracken’s teaching focuses on natural language processing, data mining for enterprise applications, and information retrieval.  She has developed curriculum for and taught an introductory course in computer programming for undergraduates.  She has also recently developed a course in Mining Social Media Data and is currently teaching a Scripting Applications Workshop.

Professional Interests

Personal Interests

Outdoor activities include hiking, biking and morris dancing.  Indoor activities include culinary and fabric arts.