University
I am Professor of Language and Machine Learning
in the Department of Computer Science and Technology
Research Interests
I am a computational linguist interested in fundamental questions about language: why have languages
evolved to be what they are today? how do we learn languages? how can we
learn second languages most efficiently? how should we organise
language-related information for particular tasks? Together with my research team,
we develop Natural Language
Processing and Machine Learning techniques to research language cognition
(computational psycholinguistics). We build cognitively-motivated
language applications and we research explanatory AI (artificial
intelligence that can explain
the decisions it has made and can provide feedback). Our research has focused on
building Natural Language Processing tools that work with
non-canonical forms of natural language (spoken language, learners,
aphasics, social media language) and also with low resource
languages (endangered languages, dialects).
We are interested in both
the automatic machine processing of language and the
cognitive processes underlying that language; we have built
models of artificial learners for first and second language learning. We are also interested
in the automatic extraction of units of information from language excerpts
(whether written or spoken) and how to represent relationships
between these units.
University Roles
I have several roles in the University: Professor of Language and Machine Learning
in the Department of Computer Science and Technology;
co-Director of the Cambridge Language Sciences Interdisciplinary
Research Centre; Lead Scientific Advisor to
Cambridge
University Press and Assessment; Principal Investigator of the
Cambridge Institute for Automated Language Teaching and Assessment
(ALTA), which is an Artificial Intelligence institute that uses
techniques from Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to
improve the experience of learning and assessment online.
Industry
I am part of iLexIR, a
University spinout that provides natural language processing
solutions---specializing in text analytics, mining, classification and
search applications.
I am Chief Scientist
for RegGenome, a University
spinout formed by colleagues from the Cambridge Judge
Business School.
Information for Prospective Students
Students interested in working within my fields of research may want
to apply to the MPhil in Advanced Computer
Science (ACS). I very rarely accept PhD students who haven't
first completed the ACS. If you wish to apply for a PhD, please look
for application information on the department web pages. Please do
not email me your CV directly. Summer internship positions are sometimes
possible for Cambridge University students but not more widely. To
let me know you have read this page before mailing me, please include
the word Jabberwock in the subject header.