Alison Huettner has a doctorate in linguistics and has worked in natural language software for 19 years. Based in Pittsburgh, she has been involved in several of the start-ups and early-stage companies affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University. She spent five years as contributing linguist and coordinator on the Caterpillar Technical English project, handling both controlled English and machine translation. Her professional experience also includes parsing technology, fact extraction, document retrieval, entity extraction, affect analysis, text-to-speech, and speech recognition systems. A career in small companies has fostered versatility: Alison’s skillset also includes project management, software process, technical documentation, and quality assurance. She has published a number of technical articles and conference papers.