Michael Flor is a computational linguist in the ETS Research Institute. He earned a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology with specialization in psycholinguistics from Tel Aviv University, Israel. He has also worked as a computational linguist for start-up companies developing natural language processing algorithms for content personalization and search engine applications.
He joined ETS in 2005. He is a senior research scientist in the Research & Development division, where he specializes in research focused on automatic processing of text data, combining linguistic, statistical, and cognitive approaches. He has contributed to the development of several ETS technologies including the e-rater automated scoring engine and the TextEvaluator text complexity estimation. His current research interests focus on automatic generation of vocabulary items and reading-comprehension questions from text, and the integration of AI and student/learner models in educational settings.
He is the author and coauthor of 16 U.S. patents in the areas of language technologies. He has served as a reviewer for several international conferences, including Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), European chapter (EACL), Nations of America chapter (NAACL), and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), as well as for top-tier research journals. He is a long-time committee member for international workshops in the areas of figurative language and computational linguistics for education. Since 2023, Michael has served as an academic editor for the PLOS journal.
Last updated: 2/9/2026