Siena College is honored to recognize the accomplishments of Dr. Sharon Gower Small as the recipient of the 2022-2023 award.
Dr. Small established the focus of her scholarship in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics immediately after 9/11. Small was recruited to be the lead research scientist of the High Quality Interactive Question Answering project funded by the federal government's Advanced Question and Answering for Intelligence program. This program and Small's research tackled complex analytical question types such as: Does North Korea have missiles that can reach the United States? Her work advanced this area with contributions including: automatically adding structure to unstructured text using a technique she developed called framing; and an automated clarification dialogue system utilizing the framed data, the continuously evolving answer space, and the analyst's initial question. These techniques were integrated with a continuously updated visualization of the answer space that the analyst could interact with in order to generate a final "answer," which was typically composed of multiple passages.
Small continued the focus of her research when she joined the Siena College Computer Science department in September of 2010 and formed the Siena College Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Since being at Siena she has helped secure more than $10,00,000 in federal grants and more than $54,000 of internal grants. She has involved over 150 students in research work and has a career total of 42 refereed publications. She has also co-authored publications with more than 20 Siena Students. Dr. Small is committed to teaching students about how Computational Linguistics can help make the world a better place. She has applied her research to many other areas including environmental science, social media, and the medical field.
Dr. Small earned her B.S. from Siena College and her M.S. and Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Albany.