M.S. Computer Science,
State University of New York at Stony Brook, December 2008
B.S. Computer Science (minor in History),
State University of New York at Binghamton, May 2006

Hi! I'm Diane and I am an Associate Research Engineer in Natural Language Processing at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey.

Research

My research interests are Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Information Retrieval and Extraction.

At Stony Brook, I worked with Professor Amanda Stent in the HCI Lab. For my thesis, I developed a Java-based NLP/Machine Learning tool that aims to help students, both native and non-native speakers of English, improve their writing. You can read my thesis, if you'd like.

Over the summer of 2008, I contributed my IR/IE/ML/NLP skills to the PLOG project, as overseen by Professors Stent and Rob Johnson, and Mike Hart. I made recommendations on NLP tools for the project and worked on a section known as Affinity-Based Access Control (ABAC), in which blog entries are only shared with others who have a common interest in the entry's topic.

In the summer of 2007, I participated in a program called the Data Sciences Summer Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I worked on a project that explored the Virtual Web as a finite-state graph. A presentation on my work can be found below.

Teaching

I was an Adjunct Instructor at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury for three academic years. The courses I taught were:

Publications, Presentations, etc.

Sheehan, K.M., Kostin, I and Napolitano, D. (2012, April). SourceRater: An automated approach for generating text complexity classifications aligned with the Common Core Standards. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), Vancouver, BC.

Sheehan, K.M., Kostin, I and Napolitano, D. (2012, April). SourceRater: Helping Teachers and Test Developers Determine the Difficulty of Text for Instruction and Assessment. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), Vancouver, BC.

Diane M. Napolitano and Amanda Stent. ``TechWriter: An Evolving System for Writing Assistance for Advanced Learners of English''. CALICO Journal 26, no. 3, pp. 611-625, May 2009. (link) (E-mail me for full version)

Diane M. Napolitano and Amanda Stent. TechWriter: An individualized approach to writing assistance and improvement. Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) workshop, "Automatic Analysis of Learner Language". 2008. (abstract) (poster)

Here is the presentation on my work at the University of Illinois that I gave to my reading group.

Activities and Affiliations

I am a member of the ACM, SIGIR, the Sierra Club, and an ARPA level member of the host of this website, a.k.a. the "PBS of the Internet".

I was the founding Vice-President and Webmaster of Women in Computer Science at Stony Brook, and I used to regularly attend both LUGSB and SBCS meetings. When I was an undergrad at Binghamton, I was a representative on the Student Assembly and was on the Rules Committee as both Vice-Chair and Chair.

I have happily been using Linux as my primary OS since 1999; first Slackware, now Debian. My other computer is Mac OS powered.

I also like to take pictures, which you can check out on my (sparsely-updated) flickr account. However, perhaps my primary hobby after computers is listening to music, and you can get a good feel for my (excellent :) ) musical taste from my last.fm account.