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Sarah Finch

PhD in Computer Science and Informatics

Summer 2019 ~ Spring 2024

Sarah Finch earned a PhD in Computer Science and Informatics from Emory University (Spring 2024). After Emory, Sarah joined the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory University as a research scientist.

Education

  • PhD in Computer Science and Informatics, Emory University (2024)
  • BS in Computer Science, Michigan State University (2018)

PhD Dissertation

Publications

  1. Finding A Voice: Exploring the Potential of African American Dialect and Voice Generation for Chatbots — Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025
  2. Leveraging Explicit Reasoning for Inference Integration in Commonsense-Augmented Dialogue Models — International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 2025
  3. Exploring the Impact of Human Evaluator Group on Chat-Oriented Dialogue Evaluation — Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (COLING-LREC), 2024
  4. ConvoSense: Overcoming Monotonous Commonsense Inferences for Conversational AI — Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), 2024
  5. Leveraging Large Language Models for Automated Dialogue Analysis — Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), 2023
  6. Don't Forget Your ABC's: Evaluating the State-of-the-Art in Chat-Oriented Dialogue Systems — Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023
  7. What Went Wrong? Explaining Overall Dialogue Quality through Utterance-Level Impacts — ACL Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Conversational AI (NLP4ConvAI), 2021
  8. An Approach to Inference-Driven Dialogue Management within a Social Chatbot — Proceedings of the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge (AlexaPrize), 2021
  9. Emora: An Inquisitive Social Chatbot Who Cares For You — Proceedings of the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge (AlexaPrize), 2020
  10. Towards Unified Dialogue System Evaluation: A Comprehensive Analysis of Current Evaluation Protocols — Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), 2020

Achievements

  • Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4 — finalist (Emora, lead) (07/2021)
  • Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 3 — 1st place (Emora, lead) (08/2020)
  • Chris Schoettle Graduate Research Award, Laney Graduate School (04/2020)
  • George W. Woodruff Fellowship (09/2018 ~ 05/2023)