Ellen M. Voorhees

Ellen M. Voorhees is affiliated with the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States. Their research primarily spans the field of Computer Science, with a notable focus on Artificial Intelligence as well as intersections with Molecular Biology, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging, and Management Science and Operations Research.

Their work covers several specialized topics including Topic Modeling, Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies, Natural Language Processing Techniques, COVID-19 diagnosis using AI, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning, and Machine Learning and Data Classification.

Voorhees has contributed to multiple scientific publications, appearing frequently in notable venues such as:

• arXiv (Cornell University)
• ACM SIGIR Forum
• Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
• Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association
• Science

These venues reflect their engagement with both computer science and biomedical informatics communities. Frequent collaborators have included Ian Soboroff, Nick Craswell, Kirk Roberts, Tasmeer Alam, and Steven Bedrick, indicating sustained partnerships in research projects and publications.

Some of Voorhees's recent papers illustrate ongoing contributions to the study and evaluation of information retrieval systems, especially in contexts related to health and deep learning:

• "TREC-COVID: rationale and structure of an information retrieval shared task for COVID-19" (2020), Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association
• "TREC-COVID" (2020), ACM SIGIR Forum
• "Rethink reporting of evaluation results in AI" (2023), Science
• "Overview of the TREC 2019 deep learning track" (2020), arXiv (Cornell University)
• "Overview of the TREC 2021 deep learning track" (2025), arXiv (Cornell University)

Their research includes leadership in benchmark tasks such as TREC-COVID, addressing retrieval challenges during the pandemic, as well as efforts to improve evaluation methodologies in AI systems.

Voorhees has been recognized by the Association for Computing Machinery with the ACM Fellow award in 2018 for their work in evaluation of information retrieval, question answering, and other language technologies. Earlier, in 2009, they were named an ACM Distinguished Member.