CV

Education

• B.S. in Computer Science, University of Nairobi, 2008
• M.S. in Language and Computer Technology, Saarland University, 2011
• Ph.D in Computational Linguistics, Saarland University, 2019

Work experience

• Jan 2020 - date: Lecturer (Computer Science)
  • Maseno University, Kisumu.
  • Duties include: Heading the post-graduate programme activities in the Department of Computer Science, Coordinating student project activities at 3rd and 4th year level.
• Oct 2014 – Dec 2019: PhD Researcher (“Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin”) at Saarland University
  • Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbruecken, Germany.
  • My current research focused on Knowledge acquisition, Topic modeling, Supervised and Semi-supervised learning.
• Jul 2012 – Oct 2019: Tutorial Fellow
  • Maseno University, Kisumu
  • Duties included: Curriculum development, teaching, and grading, Organizing and conducting programming hackathons for Bachelor students, Mentoring, and Supervising student projects
  • Courses taught: Object Oriented programming with Java, Essentials of Artificial Intelligence, Data mining, Information retrieval, Probability and Statistics, Automata theory, Discrete mathematics.
• Jan 2012 – Jun 2012: Lecturer
  • Inoorero University - ICT, Nairobi.
  • Courses taught: Object Oriented Analysis and Design with UML, Event Driven programming, Programming with Java
• Oct 2011 – Jun 2012: Part time Lecturer
  • University of Nairobi, Nairobi.
  • Courses taught: Knowledge based systems, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
• Mar 2011 – Aug 2011: Project Intern
  • Fondazione Bruno Kessler - FBK, University of Trento, (HLT group - Natural Language Processing). Trento, Italy.
  • Duties included: My research was on extracting and evaluating relational patterns extracted from Wikipedia in entailment based QA over Linked Data.
• Employed Dec 2009 – Jul 2010: Intern
  • Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI), Saarbruecken, Germany.
  • Duties included:
    • Maintain corpora lists and descriptions for various projects within Computational Linguistics Department (Uds) and DFKI (Uds):
    • create a disc system that all relevant groups on campus could mount.
    • put all corpora on campus on that list and update wiki entries
    • make a procedure of how to add/order new corpora to the Disc
• Nov 2008 - Sept 2009: Junior Project Manager
  • Voxiva (acquired by Wellpass), Nairobi
  • Duties included:
    • Elicit system requirements from customers.
    • Develop AS-IS and TO-BE document solutions as deliverables.
    • Proactively communicate and collaborate with customers.
    • Track technical progress of projects.
    • Plan, schedule, and monitor the inventory of the project products and materials.
    • Projects: Farmchem Application, PSI Application (Population Services International)
• Aug 2007 – Oct 2007: Intern
  • Barclays Bank, Nairobi
  • Duties included: Processing e-box messages, inward swift messages/payments, posting of inward TT payments, Processing and Mailing customer advices

Skills

• Natural Language Processing
• Programmig
  • Python
  • Java
  • R
• Research
• Teaching

Publications

Acquiring Relational Patterns from Wikipedia: A Case Study.

Rahmad Mahendra, Lilian Wanzare, Raffaella Bernardi, Alberto Lavelli and Bernardo Magnini (2011). "Acquiring Relational Patterns from Wikipedia: A Case Study." LTC 2011 (5th Language and Technology Conference) Proceeding, Poland.

DeScript: A crowdsourced Corpus for the Acquisition of High-Quality Script Knowledge.

Wanzare, L., Zarcone A.,Thater, S., Pinkal, M. (2016). "DeScript: A crowdsourced Corpus for the Acquisition of High-Quality Script Knowledge." Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Portoroz, Slovenia..

Inducing Script Structure from Crowdsourced Event Descriptions via Semi-Supervised Clustering

Wanzare, L., Zarcone, A., Thater, S. & Pinkal, M. (2017). "Inducing Script Structure from Crowdsourced Event Descriptions via Semi-Supervised Clustering." Proceedings of the Workshop on Linking Models of Lexical, Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics (LSDSem), Valencia, Spain..

Detecting Everyday Scenarios in Narrative texts

Wanzare, L., Roth, M. ,& Pinkal, M. (2019). "Detecting Everyday Scenarios in Narrative texts." Proceedings of the Second Workshop of Storytelling@ACL, Florence, Italy.

Talks

Teaching

Teaching experience 1

Teaching experience 2

Teaching experience 3

Service and leadership

• Currently chair of postgraduate studies department of Computer Science, Maseno University.