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

Professor Kalina Bontcheva
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 Paul Clough
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
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.

Dr Mark Hepple
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.

Dr Carolina Scarton
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.

Dr Mark Stevenson
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
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.
Management Team
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