Her research expertise is in the area of computational linguistics, especially semantics. Her work is on distributed, flexible approaches to describing word meaning, and on combining them with logic-based representations of sentences and other larger structures. At the word level, she is studying flexible representations of meaning in context, independent of word sense lists. At the sentence level, she is looking into probabilistic frameworks that can draw weighted inferences from combined logical and distributed representations. Katrin Erk completed her dissertation on tree description languages and ellipsis at Saarland University in 2002, under the supervision of Gert Smolka and Manfred Pinkal. From 2002 to 2006, she held a researcher position in the Salsa project at Saarland University, working on manual and automatic frame-semantic analysis.