News
New EPSRC grant starting in October, and a new paper:
- One Research Associate available on a three-year EPSRC grant starting October 2012: A Unified Model of Compositional and Distributional Semantics: Theory and Applications. Further information can be obtained from Stephen Clark.
- Type-Driven Syntax and Semantics for Composing Meaning Vectors: a draft chapter to appear in the forthcoming OUP book on Compositional Methods in Physics and Linguistics, Heunen, Sadrzadeh and Grefenstette Eds. [pdf]
Biography
I am a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge Computer
Laboratory. Previously I was a University
Lecturer in Computer Science at Oxford University and a
postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh.
My postgraduate training was in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (PhD, University of Sussex)
and Cognitive Science (MSc, University of Manchester).
I was an undergraduate at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, studying Maths and Philosophy.
Academic genealogy:
- PhD supervisor: David Weir
- Postdoctoral advisor: Mark Steedman
Research
My research area is Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics. I enjoy working on problems which involve elements of Computer Science, Linguistics and Machine Learning. Current research interests, including some of the PhD topics of my current students, are as follows:
- Compositional distributional models of meaning
- Dependency models and shift-reduce architectures for discriminative CCG parsing
- Grammar-based discriminative generation for statistical machine translation
- Modelling aspects for diversity in search
- Semantic parsing
- Transformations for linguistic steganography
Output
Publications, software, talks:
- Complete list of publications (profile: Google Scholar; ACL Anthology Network)
- C&C language processing tools
- Selected recent seminars:
- A Mathematical Framework for a Distributional Compositional Model of Meaning (Edinburgh, Feb 12; Potsdam, Dec 11) [pdf]
- Linguistic Steganography: Information Hiding in Text (Edinburgh, May 12; Sheffield, Mar 11; Surrey, Nov 09) [pdf]
- Parsing Fast and Deep with a wide-coverage lexicalised-grammar parser (Trento, Oct 11; Amsterdam, Dec 10) [pdf]
People
Current research students:
- Saad Aloteibi.
Diversity in Search
- Sandro Bauer
- Ching-Yun (Frannie) Chang. Transformations for Linguistic Steganography
- Wenduan Xu
Current postdocs:
- Andreas Vlachos. Semantic Parsing on the SPACEBOOK project
- Yue Zhang. Generation for SMT on the FAUST project
Past research students and postdocs:
- James Smith (DPhil, Oxford, 2012). Example-Based Methods for Natural Language Processing
- Yue Zhang (DPhil, Oxford, 2009). Discriminative Learning Approaches for the Statistical Processing of Chinese
- Brian Harrington (DPhil, Oxford, 2009). ASKNet: Automatically Creating Semantic Knowledge Networks from Natural Language Text
- Laura Rimell (RA 2007-2010). Parsing of biomedical text and parser evaluation
Grants
My research is funded by the EPSRC, the EU 7th Framework Programme (FP7), Google, and Microsoft.
- A Unified Model of Compositional and Distributional Semantics: Theory and Applications. EPSRC (2012-2015)
- Knowledge Discovery and Extraction from Large-Scale Entity-Relationship Networks. Microsoft Research PhD Scholarship Programme (2011-2014)
- Knowledge Extraction and Discovery from Large-Scale Entity-Relationship Graphs. Google Research Award (2011-2012)
- SpaceBook - Spatial & Personal Adaptive Communication Environment. EU FP7 (2011-2014)
- FAUST - Feedback for User Adaptive Statistical Translation. EU FP7 (2010-2013)
- Accurate and Efficient Parsing of Biomedical Text. EPSRC (2007-2010)
- Example-Based Methods for Natural Language Processing. EPSRC CASE studentship with Sharp Laboratories of Europe (2005-2009)
Teaching
At Cambridge I teach/have taught the following courses:
- Programming in C and C++ (Part IB, Michaelmas 2011)
- Syntax and Semantics of Natural Language (MPhil ACS, Part III, Lent 2012, 2011)
- Statistical Machine Translation (MPhil ACS, Lent 2011)
- Introduction to Natural Language Processing (MPhil ACS, Part III, Michaelmas 2011, 2010)
- Information Retrieval (Part II, 2009)
- Various text and language processing modules on the MPhil in Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology (2009-10)
At Oxford I developed a popular MSc course on Information Retrieval and Statistical Text Processing, which ran for five years, as well as tutoring Keble College undergraduates across a range of computer science subjects. I also supervised 18 6-month MSc projects on a variety of topics in language processing and AI, and supervised a number of final-year undergraduate projects. In 2007 I was awarded an Oxford University Teaching Award.
Media
- Breaking new ground in Natural Language Processing (Cambridge Language Sciences Initiative, May 2012)
- Quantum Links Let Computers Understand Language (New Scientist, issue 2790, December 2010)
Activities
- Chair-elect of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) (2011-2013)
- Program co-chair (with Sandra Carberry) for the 48th Annual Meeting of the ACL (ACL-10)
- Team Leader for the JHU Research Workshop on Large-Scale Syntactic Processing: Parsing the Web (2009)
- Workshops co-chair for EACL-09
- Area chair (Syntax and Parsing) for ACL-08, EMNLP-09, IJCNLP-11, and ACL-12
- Editorial Board member for Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (2011-2014),
Computational Linguistics (2009-2012), Computer Speech and Language (2009-),
Journal of Natural Language Engineering (2004-)
Contact
University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
William Gates Building, 15 JJ Thomson Avenue
Cambridge CB3 0FD, UK
stephen.clark@cl.cam.ac.uk
+44 (0)1223 763704
- © Stephen Clark. Last updated: May 2012.