Doctoral Candidate, Information Science
Department of Information Science
College of Information
University of North Texas
Discovery Park, Room E297J
Brenda dot Reyes at unt dot edu
Full CV | Two Page CV

Research Interests

My research interests are in the areas of Web Preservation, Multilingual Information Access, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, and Machine Learning. I have been working as a Research Assistant for Dr.Jiangping Chen's Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) project, which seeks to help non-native speakers of English access digital library information in their native languages. I recently explored how to use supervised Machine Learning techniques to understand and predict the adequacy and fluency of English-Spanish machine translations.

My research spans not only the practical, but also the theoretical. For my dissertation, I seek to create a theoretical model of information quality for web archives. In the near future, I seek to both continue my research, as well as to participate in new and exciting projects.

Recent Publications and Presentations

  • Reyes Ayala, B., Knudson, R., Cao, G., Wang, X., & Chen, J. (in press). Metadata records machine translation combining multi-engine outputs with limited parallel data. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. doi: 10.1002/asi.23925
  • Reyes Ayala, B. (2017). We need new names: Applying existing models of information quality to web archives. Bulletin of IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries, 13 (1). Retrieved from http://www.ieee-tcdl.org/Bulletin/v11n2/
  • Reyes Ayala, B. (2017, June). Web archives: A preliminary exploration of user expectations vs. reality. In E. A. Fox (Chair), Web Archiving and Digital Libraries. Workshop conducted at the meeting of the Joint Conference of Digital Libraries, Toronto, Canada.
  • Reyes Ayala, B. & Chen, J. (2017, June). A machine learning approach to evaluating translation quality. Poster presented at the meeting of the Joint Conference of Digital Libraries, Toronto, Canada.
  • Chen, J., Namgoong, M., Reyes Ayala, B., Cao, G., & Wang, X. (2017, March).Building a multi-lingual test collection for metadata records. Poster presented at the iConference 2017, Wuhan, China.

Recent Professional Experience

  • JCDL 2018, Publicity Chair
  • Graduate Research Assistant and Lab Manager, 2015 - Present
  • Contribute to Dr. Jiangping Chen's Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) project, which seeks to apply Machine Translation (MT) technologies for providing services to digital collections in English, Chinese, and Spanish
  • Manage the day-to-day operations and oversee the staïf the Intelligent Information Access (IIA) Lab
  • Review papers and provide feedback to authors for the journal The Electronic Library
  • Serve as Teaching Assistant for Dr. Chen's class Computational Methods for Information Systems (Spring 2016 and Spring 2017)