Verena Rieser (born 1979) [1] is a German computer scientist specialising in natural-language generation, including conversational modelling [2] as well as studies of how gender cues in synthetic language can trigger biases in the people who interact with them. [2] [3] She is a professor in the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, [4] where she directs the Natural Language Processing Laboratory. [5]
After beginning her university studies in literature, Rieser switched to linguistics, [2] [3] and earned a master's degree in applied linguistics and information science from the University of Regensburg in 2003. She earned a second master's degree in informatics from the University of Edinburgh in 2005, [1] supervised by Johanna Moore, [3] and completed a Ph.D. in computational linguistics at Saarland University in 2008. [1]
After returning to the University of Edinburgh as a postdoctoral researcher, she became an assistant professor at Heriot-Watt University in 2011, and was promoted to Professor of Artificial Intelligence there in 2017. [1]
In 2020 she became co-founder of a company, ALANA AI, for which she works part-time. [1]
With Oliver Lemon, Rieser is a coauthor of the book Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Dialogue Systems: A Data-driven Methodology for Dialogue Management and Natural Language Generation (Springer, 2011)