Diana Maynard is a research fellow at the University of Sheffield, UK. She was born in Chertsey, Surrey, and spent her childhood in Surrey, Hampshire, Wiltshire and North Yorkshire. She acquired a BSc in Computational Linguistics and French from UMIST in 1995, an MSc in Cognitive Science from the University of Manchester in 1996, and a PhD from Manchester Metropolitan University in automatic term recognition in 2000. Her main interests are in information extraction, opinion mining, social media analysis, terminology and semantic web technologes. Since 2000 she has worked in the GATE team, where she leads the development of Sheffield's open-source multilingual Information Extraction tools, and has led research teams on a number of UK and EU projects. She is chair of the annual GATE training course and leads the GATE consultancy on IE and opinion mining. She has published extensively, organised a number of national and international conferences, workshops and tutorials, and has given a number of invited talks and keynote speeches.