Research Interests

• I am the lead computational linguist in the GATE research team of 15 full-time research staff.
• Chair of the GATE training course since 2010. I teach courses both within the GATE training course and elsewhere on IE, Semantic Annotation, JAPE, Advanced IE, social media analysis and opinion mining.
• I am PI on the following EU projects:
  • KNOWMAK, developing tools for term extraction and ontology creation (2017-2019);
  • COMRADES, developing tools for social media analysis and informativeness classification in the area of disaster management (2016-2018);
  • DecarboNet project, developing tools for social media analysis and opinion mining in the domain of climate change (2014-2016).
  One of my particular areas of interest is the detection and analysis of sarcasm.

In the past, I have been:

• Co-chair of the ISWC Semantic Web Challenge from 2010-2013.
• GATE team leader for the Semantic Knowledge Base project for The National Archives, developing an intelligent discovery tool to improve access to the archived UK Government websites.
• WP4 leader for the EU-funded FP7 ARCOMEM project, which aims to provide tools for archivists, curators and librarians to help exploit social media and make our organisational memories richer and more relevant. In this project our main research interests lie in opinion mining and entity and event extraction.

I also previously worked on the NeOn EU project with Wim Peters , and on the MUSING EU project with Horacio Saggion . These projects involve the development of semantic web technology, including linguistic methods for ontology-based information extraction, ontology population and related research. I have recently been developing the SPRAT tool for extracting relations from text and ontology generation.

I have been Sheffield's Technical Project Manager for the KnowledgeWeb EU Network of Excellence and principal researcher on the MUSE project, which performed robust named entity recognition from a variety of text types and genres. As part of the TIDES surprise language program, I wrote a named entity recognition system for the Cebuano language in a week, and one for Hindi in a month. I also developed NE systems for Arabic, Chinese and Russian.

For the last 15 years I have led the development of many of the linguistic resources in GATE, worked on parts of the MUMIS project, led the development of the HaSIE project and worked on the Multiflora project. My particular speciality in GATE is using it in unusual ways and finding bugs.

Previous research activities

• External PhD examiner for Aminu Bui Mohammed, Robert Gordon University Aberdeen, 2015
• Advisory Board Member for the TSB-funded project COMMA

I also have a variety of other research interests. My PhD was on the subject of automatic term extraction from medical text. You can download a copy of my PhD thesis on automatic term recognition. There are also lots of papers about it and related topics. This work was quite multidisciplinary, encompassing the fields of medical informatics, terminology, information retrieval, corpus linguistics, and, of course, NLP. I am also particularly interested in natural language ambiguity - my MSc thesis was concerned with prepositional ambiguity, and in particular, the word "with". You can also download my MSc thesis.

Another area that I am very interested in is accessibility and usability issues. I lecture and provide consulting services in accessible web design. My consulting projects include the Yorkshire Federation of Disability Sports Organisation, the Yorkshire Building Society, and Insulin Pumpers UK, which I now maintain. I am currently learning to use Drupal.

My papers are mostly available on the publications page, although they may not be up to date.