I am an Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in the School of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield. My research focuses on machine learning and deep learning for natural language processing (NLP), with applications across education, healthcare, creativity, social media, and finance. My group and I work on a wide range of NLP tasks, including grammatical error correction, automated assessment, summarisation, machine translation, information extraction, text classification, sentiment analysis, and emotion detection. Our current projects explore computer-assisted language learning (CALL), human-centered NLP in educational settings, computational models of code-switching (mixing multiple languages within a sentence), and creative AI.
Previously, I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Informatics at King's College London, and a Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. I hold a PhD in Natural Language Processing and an MPhil in Advanced Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, as well as a BSc(Eng) from Queen Mary University of London.
I am affiliated with The Alan Turing Institute, contributing to projects within the Data-Centric Engineering Programme. I also hold affiliated staff positions at the University of Cambridge and King's College London, and I am a Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge.
I welcome PhD applications in the areas of NLP and machine learning -- feel free to reach out if you're interested in joining my research group.
Research Interests
- Educational technology (EdTech)
- Language acquisition
- Educational NLP
- Multilingual NLP
- Low-recourse NLP
- Transfer and multi-task learning
- Unsupervised and semi-supervised learning
- Explainable machine learning
I occasionally offer consultancy services in NLP, computational linguistics, and machine learning. Please feel free to get in touch if you’re interested in collaborating.
Current Activities
- Co-organiser of the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, co-located with ACL 2025
- Co-organiser of the AIED 2025 Tutorial on NLP and Generative AI for Language Learning and Assessment, co-located with AIED 2025
- Member of King's Institute for Artificial Intelligence (2023-)
- Member of AGI Odyssey Executive Committee (2023-)
- Member of the ACL Professional Conduct Committee (2021-)
- Treasurer of the ACL Special Interest Group on Building Educational Applications (SIGEDU) (2021-)
- Member of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2012-)
- Member of Cambridge Language Sciences (2012-)
- Area Chair for ACL, EMNLP (2022-)
- Editorial Board Member for PeerJ Computer Science (2022-)
- Reviewer for Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics; Computational Linguistics; IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing; International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education; Computer Speech & Language; Computational Intelligence; Computer Science Review; Data-Centric Engineering; Psychometrics and Educational Measurement; Educational and Psychological Measurement; and Stats journals
- Programme Committee Member (annually) of ACL, NAACL, EACL, AACL, EMNLP, COLING, CoNLL, AIED, EDM, *SEM, SIGDIAL, BEA, and various other conferences and workshops
Recent Activities
- Co-organiser of the First Workshop on Writing Aids at the Crossroads of AI, Cognitive Science and NLP, co-located with COLING 2025
- Co-organiser of the 19th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, co-located with NAACL 2024
- Co-organiser of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, co-located with ACL 2023
- Co-organiser of the BEA 2023 Shared Task on Generating AI Teacher Responses in Educational Dialogues, co-located with ACL 2023
- Session Chair for AIED 2024
- Publicity Chair for IC 2023
- Co-organiser of the 17th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, co-located with NAACL 2022
- Co-organiser of the 2022 GirlsWhoML Cambridge Introduction to Machine Learning Workshop
- Co-organiser of the 2022 Oxbridge Women in Computer Science Conference
- Conference Co-chair of women@CL (2021-2022)
- Cambridge Co-chair of GirlsWhoML (2021-2022)