The centre is hosted within the Department of Computer Science which has an international reputation for the quality of its research and teaching. In the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF – the UK Government’s national assessment of university research), 92% of our research work was rated world leading (4*) or internationally excellent (3*) in terms of its originality, significance and rigour.
The Department has a REF grade point average of 3.39, ranking them 5th out of 89 computer science departments in the UK. The department currently hosts 131 research students and at present it has research funding from many sources including from RCUK of over £14m.
The Department is a national leader and a highly respected global player in Speech and Language Technologies, with arguably the largest mass of Speech and Language Technologies researchers in a single department in the UK.
The academic quality of the Speech and Language Technologies team is reflected in their very significant contribution the high score of the Department of Computer Science in the last REF exercise and by the number of EPSRC/ERC fellowships awarded to team members. The team has an outstanding track record in research grant awards, impact and award of PhDs; in addition, they have an extensive set of international industrial collaborators, across many sectors and ranging from SMEs to global players. In summary, they have the know-how, the experience, the external support and the passion to deliver outstanding research outputs in SLT with demonstrable national and international need.
Centre Directors
Professor Thomas Hain
Head of the Speech and Hearing Research Group
Prof Hain is a world leader in speech recognition, heads the Voicebase Centre for Speech and Language Technology and is a leader in the speech community.
‘Talking and listening, understanding and expressive communication are skills that we all have. To this day we struggle to build machines that come close to human abilities. To explore and invent methods that allow us to recognise what is spoken, to understand, transform and interpret human communication has been the focus of my research. I am interested in machine learning methods that allow us to model communication and interaction, to be able to help people communicate, learn, and engage with new technology.’
Example of possible topics for supervision include; advanced modelling of speech processes, models of acoustic environments or of language, relationship between languages, and systems that transcribe spoken words, analyse them, transform the signal or the language, and on systems that respond to you and learn from you.
Professor Rob Gaizauskas
Natural Language Processing Research Group
Prof Gaizauskas is internationally known for his research on information extraction and text mining, temporal information processing, question answering and summarisation.
‘Can we build we build computer programs that “understand” human language? This question is of interest from both a cognitive science/linguistic perspective and from an applied/engineering perspective. What are the syntactic/semantic and pragmatic mechanisms available in human languages and how do intentional agents deploy them to communicate and accomplish goals in the world? How can we use our current, partial understanding of NLP to engineer applications that help people to gain better access to information in massive amounts of textual data and to dynamically interact with intelligent agents via NL dialogue?’
Example of possible topics for supervision include; information extraction/text mining; automatic summarization; semantic annotation of temporal and spatial information; automatic generation of image descriptions; common sense knowledge and NL understanding; task-oriented dialogue.
Research Supervisors and Associated Academics
Dr Nikos Aletras
Supervisor and Theme Lead for: SLT Frontiers - novel methods
Research interests: Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning for NLP, Social Media Analysis, NLP in the legal domain.
Professor Jon Barker
Supervisor and Theme Lead for: Robust SLTs
Research interests: Noise-robust speech recognition, speech enhancement, hearing aid signal processing, perception of speech in noise, machine listening, acoustic scene analysis.
Dr Loïc Barrault
Supervisor and Theme Lead for: Scalable SLTs
Research interests: statistical and neural machine translation including linguistics aspects (factored neural machine translation) and considering multiple modalities (multimodal neural machine translation).
Professor Kalina Bontcheva
Supervisor
Research interests: Analysis of online misinformation and bots, hate speech and online abuse detection, NLP methods for social media analysis, open source tools, information extraction, text analytics, social media summarisation, ethics and privacy in social media research.
Professor Guy Brown
Supervisor
Research interests: Machine hearing, auditory modelling, speech perception, hearing impairment, robustness to noise and reverberation, active hearing (e.g. in robotic systems), clinical applications of speech technology.
Dr Heidi Christensen
Supervisor and Theme Lead for: Novel SLT applications
Research interests: Speech recognition for atypical voices, audio and speech processing for assistive technology, machine listening, conversational interfaces and pathological speech processing.
Professor Paul Clough
Supervisor
Research interests: developing effective retrieval technologies that support users as they seek to fulfil their information needs including multilingual search, retrieval of images, geo-spatial search, analysis of transaction logs, text re-use and plagiarism detection, and the evaluation of search systems.
Professor Hamish Cunningham
Associated Academic
Research interests: language analysis infrastructure, text mining and textual big data processing. Physical computing; micro-manufacturing; maker culture; Raspberry Pi. Privacy-preserving social media. Crowdfunding.
Professor Phil Green
Director of Studies
Research interests: automatic speech recognition, auditory scene analysis, clinical applications of speech technology.
Dr Yoshi Gotoh
Supervisor
Research interests: Spoken language processing, audio visual processing, information retrieval from audio visual contents.
Dr Mark Hepple
Supervisor
Research interests: Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing including formal grammar and parsing, information extraction, clinical text mining, temporal information processing, robust dialogue processing, and efficient storage of large-scale linguistic data.
Professor Jochen Leidner
Theme Lead for: Interconnecting SLT with the world
A Director of Research, R&D at Refinitiv Labs in London, where he heads the R&D site. He is also Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor of Data Analytics at the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield.
Dr Chenghua Lin
Supervisor
Research interests: Natural language processing/generation, text mining, representation learning, sentiment analysis, metaphor processing, dialogue systems.
Dr Diana Maynard
Supervisor
Research interests: Social media analysis, sentiment analysis, news and information bias, semantic search, and multidisciplinary work combining text analysis with behavioural and social information.
Professor Roger Moore
Supervisor
Research interests: Spoken language processing, speech technology, voice-enabled agents/robots, vocal interactivity, speech perception/production, clinical/creative applications of speech technology.
Dr Anton Ragni
Supervisor
Research interests: Core speech recognition, efficient and expressive speech synthesis, spoken language translation, information retrieval and conversation modelling.
Dr Carolina Scarton
Supervisor
Research interests: Personalised NLP, Test simplification, Online content verification (misinformation detection), Quality estimation of machine translation, Document-level evaluation of NLP tasks outputs, Readability assessment, Automatic construction of computational lexical resources.
Professor Lucia Specia
Associated Academic
Research interests: Multimodal machine learning, language grounding, machine translation, text adaptation, quality estimation.
Dr Mark Stevenson
Supervisor
Research interests: Lexical semantics/analysis of word meanings (word sense disambiguation and lexical similarity). Applications include medicine (text mining for systematic reviews, biomedical relation extraction, data mining and contradiction identification), document analysis (identification of text reuse/plagiarism and author identification) and Information Extraction.
Professor Aline Villavicencio
Supervisor
Research interests: Lexical semantics, neural network word and phrase representation learning, word embeddings. Multiword expressions, idiomatic, figurative and metaphorical language. Cognitive computational modelling, algorithms for language acquisition, processing and loss, language profiling in clinical conditions. Multilinguality, NLP for low-resourced languages, text simplification, parsing.
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