I'm a member of the Natural Language and Information Processing Group at the Computer Laboratory in Cambridge. I recently defended my PhD thesis on Learning Noun Compound Semantics, which was supervised by Ann Copestake. My interests revolve around the application of machine learning techniques to semantic processing tasks, especially tasks at the interface between lexical knowledge (what individual words mean) and relational knowledge (what combinations of words mean). I'm currently working as a postdoc on an EPSRC-funded "knowledge transfer" project involving Linguamatics, looking at semantic issues in biomedical text processing.
In 2003 I graduated with a BA (Mod) in Computer Science, Linguistics and German from Trinity College Dublin. I subsequently spent a year studying Indian linguistic theory at the Faculty of Oriental Studies (now the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies) in Cambridge under Dr. Eivind Kahrs. In my spare time I do a lot of running. I also enjoy travelling, and taking photographs of whatever catches my eye. I maintain a Flickr site here.
I have compiled a bibliography of computational and linguistic literature relating to compound nouns; maybe someone will find it useful. There's also a Bibsonomy version which may be updated more frequently and has extras like indexible tags and abstracts.
I am co-orgainising two tasks at the 2010 SemEval competition: one on classifying semantic relations in text and another on paraphrasing compound nouns (get keen!). Andreas Vlachos and I have started an NLIP Reading Group for the discussion of interesting NLP papers (all are welcome!). I co-organised CLUK 2007, which was held at the Computer Lab.
