Dr Mark Stevenson
School of Computer Science
Senior Lecturer
School Programmes Lead (UG)
Member of the Natural Language Processing research group
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+44 114 222 1921
Full contact details
School of Computer Science
Regent Court (DCS)
211 Portobello
Sheffield
S1 4DP
- Profile
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Mark Stevenson is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science. He is a member of the Natural Language Processing group which he joined in 1995. His PhD, on Word Sense Disambiguation, was published as a monograph.
He has been Principal Investigator of projects funded by a range of sources including the EU, EPSRC and Google. He was an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow (2006-2011) and co-ordinator of the EU-funded project PATHS.
He has also worked in a range of commercial and academic organisations including Reuters Ltd (where he was involved in the production and dissemination of the widely used Reuters Corpus), Adastral Park (British Telecom’s research lab) and the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University.
- Research interests
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Mark Stevenson’s research focusses on Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval. Topics he has worked on include word sense disambiguation, Information Extraction, plagiarism/reuse detection, lexicon adaptation, cross-lingual information retrieval and exploratory search.
His research includes applications of these technologies to a range of areas including biomedical journal articles (interpretation of documents, extraction of information from them and data mining information from corpora), cultural heritage (automatic organisation of corpora, exploratory search interfaces) and software testing (generation of realistic test suites).
- Publications
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Books
Journal articles
- The FAIR database: facilitating access to public health research literature. JAMIA Open, 7(4).
- Investigating the Feasibility of Deep Learning Methods for Urdu Word Sense Disambiguation. ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, 21(2), 1-16.
- A machine-learning assisted review of the use of habit formation in medication adherence interventions for long-term conditions. Health Psychology Review. View this article in WRRO
- Paraphrase type identification for plagiarism detection using contexts and word embeddings. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 18. View this article in WRRO
- SciBabel: a system for crowd-sourced validation of automatic translations of scientific texts. Genomics and Informatics, 18(2).
- A Sense Annotated Corpus for All-Words Urdu Word Sense Disambiguation. Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, 18(4). View this article in WRRO
- A Word Sense Disambiguation Corpus for Urdu. Language Resources and Evaluation. View this article in WRRO
- Co-occurrence graphs for word sense disambiguation in the biomedical domain. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 87, 9-19. View this article in WRRO
- Quantifying and filtering knowledge generated by literature based discovery. BMC Bioinformatics, (Suppl 7):249, 59-67. View this article in WRRO
- Evaluating topic representations for exploring document collections. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 68(1), 154-167. View this article in WRRO
- Why are these similar? Investigating item similarity types in a large digital library. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 67(7), 1624-1638. View this article in WRRO
- A corpus of potentially contradictory research claims from cardiovascular research abstracts. Journal of Biomedical Semantics, 7. View this article in WRRO
- An IR-Based Approach Utilizing Query Expansion for Plagiarism Detection in MEDLINE. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, 14(4), 796-804. View this article in WRRO
- Exploring relation types for literature-based discovery. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 22(5), 987-992. View this article in WRRO
- Automatic generation of valid and invalid test data for string validation routines using web searches and regular expressions. Science of Computer Programming, 97(4), 405-425.
- Cognitive styles within an exploratory search system for digital libraries. Journal of Documentation, 70, 970-996. View this article in WRRO
- Evaluating hierarchical organisation structures for exploring digital libraries. Information Retrieval, 17(4), 351-379. View this article in WRRO
- Determining the Difficulty of Word Sense Disambiguation. Journal of Biomedical Informatics. View this article in WRRO
- Computing similarity between items in a digital library of cultural heritage. Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage, 5(4).
- Retrieving candidate plagiarised documents using query expansion. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 7224 LNCS, 207-218.
- Exploiting domain information for Word Sense Disambiguation of medical documents.. J Am Med Inform Assoc, 19(2), 235-240.
- Developing a corpus of plagiarised short answers. LANG RESOUR EVAL, 45(1), 5-24. View this article in WRRO
- Disambiguation of medline abstracts using topic models. International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Proceedings, 59-62.
- Assessing the contribution of shallow and deep knowledge sources for word sense disambiguation. LANG RESOUR EVAL, 44(4), 295-313. View this article in WRRO
- Graph-based word sense disambiguation of biomedical documents.. Bioinformatics, 26(22), 2889-2896.
- Disambiguation in the biomedical domain: the role of ambiguity type.. J Biomed Inform, 43(6), 972-981.
- Disambiguation of ambiguous biomedical terms using examples generated from the UMLS Metathesaurus.. J Biomed Inform, 43(5), 762-773.
- The Role of Natural Language Processing in Information Retrieval: Searching for Meaning and Structure, 215-231.
- Dependency pattern models for information extraction. Research on Language and Computation, 7(1), 13-39.
- Disambiguation of biomedical text using diverse sources of information.. BMC Bioinformatics, 9 Suppl 11, S7. View this article in WRRO
- Fact distribution in information extraction. LANG RESOUR EVAL, 40(2), 183-201.
- Handbook for Language Engineers by Farghali, A. (Ed.), (2003) University of Chicago Press, 320pp. Journal of Natural Language Engineering, 11(1), 125-128.
- Introduction to the special issue on word sense disambiguation. COMPUT SPEECH LANG, 18(3), 201-207.
- View this article in WRRO
- The Grammar of Sense: Using part-of-speech tags as a first step in semantic disambiguation. Natural Language Engineering, 4(3), 135-144.
- Stopping Methods for Technology Assisted Reviews based on Point Processes. ACM Transactions on Information Systems.
- Refining Boolean Queries to Identify Relevant Studies for Systematic Review Updates. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. View this article in WRRO
Chapters
- View this article in WRRO
- Knowledge Sources for WSD, Text, Speech and Language Technology (pp. 217-251). Springer Netherlands
- Knowledge Sources for WSD, WORD SENSE DISAMBIGUATION: ALGORITHMS AND APPLICATIONS (pp. 217-251).
Conference proceedings papers
- UserReg : a simple but strong model for rating prediction. ICASSP 2021 - 2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. Toronto, ON, Canada, 6 June 2021 - 11 June 2021.
- DTMBIO 2020. Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management
- Automatic Generation of Topic Labels. Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval View this article in WRRO
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- Improving ranking for systematic reviews using query adaptation. CLEF 2019 Proceedings : Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction (pp 141-148). Lugarno, Switzerland, 9 September 2019 - 12 September 2019. View this article in WRRO
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- A Dataset of Systematic Reviews Updates. The 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (pp 1257-1260), 21 July 2019 - 25 July 2019. View this article in WRRO
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- Hyperlocal home location identification of Twitter profiles. HT 2017 - Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (pp 45-54) View this article in WRRO
- Continuous N-gram Representations for Authorship Attribution. Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers (pp 267-273). Valencia, Spain, 3 April 2017 - 7 April 2017. View this article in WRRO
- Plagiarism Detection in Texts Obfuscated with Homoglyphs (pp 669-675) View this article in WRRO
- Identifying Potential Early Biomarkers Of Acute Myocardial Infarction In The Biomedical Literature: A Comparison Of Text Mining And Manual Sifting Techniques. Value in Health, Vol. 19(7) (pp A367-A367)
- User profiling with geo-located posts and demographic data. Proceedings of the First Workshop on NLP and Computational Social Science, November 2016 - November 2016.
- TM 2015 -- Topic Models. Proceedings of the 24th ACM International on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management - CIKM '15, 18 October 2015 - 23 October 2015.
- Improving distant supervision using inference learning. Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers), July 2015 - July 2015. View this article in WRRO
- A Hybrid Distributional and Knowledge-based Model of Lexical Semantics. Proceedings of the Fourth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, June 2015 - June 2015.
- Automatic identification of potentially contradictory claims to support systematic reviews. 2015 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM), 9 November 2015 - 12 November 2015.
- View this article in WRRO
- Labelling Topics using Unsupervised Graph-based Methods. Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2014), Vol. 2 (pp 631-636)
- View this article in WRRO
- Representing topics labels for exploring digital libraries. IEEE/ACM Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, 8 September 2014 - 12 September 2014.
- Supporting Information Access and Sensemaking in Digital Cultural Heritage Environments (pp 143-154)
- Self-supervised Relation Extraction Using UMLS (pp 116-127)
- Information seeking in digital cultural heritage with PATHS. SIGIR 2013 - Proceedings of the 36th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (pp 1105-1106)
- Evolving readable string test inputs using a natural language model to reduce human oracle cost. Proceedings - IEEE 6th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2013 (pp 352-361)
- PATHS: Personalising access to cultural heritage spaces. Proceedings of the 2012 18th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia, VSMM 2012: Virtual Systems in the Information Society (pp 469-474)
- Automated discovery of valid test strings from the web using dynamic regular expressions collation and natural language processing. Proceedings - International Conference on Quality Software (pp 79-88)
- Search-based test input generation for string data types using the results of web queries. Proceedings - IEEE 5th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2012 (pp 141-150)
- View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- Reducing qualitative human oracle costs associated with automatically generated test data. 1st International Workshop on Software Test Output Validation, STOV 2010, in Conjunction with the 2010 International Conference on Software Testing and Analysis, ISSTA 2010 (pp 1-4)
- Knowledge sources for word sense disambiguation of biomedical text. Proceedings of the Workshop on Current Trends in Biomedical Natural Language Processing - BioNLP '08, 19 June 2008 - 19 June 2008.
- PAN@FIRE. Proceedings of the 5th 2013 Forum on Information Retrieval Evaluation - FIRE '13, 4 December 2013 - 6 December 2013.
- View this article in WRRO
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- Introduction
- View this article in WRRO
- Stopping Criteria for Technology Assisted Reviews based on Counting Processes. Proceedings of the 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR ’21), 11 July 2021 - 15 July 2021.
Reports
Preprints
- Bio-SIEVE: Exploring Instruction Tuning Large Language Models for Systematic Review Automation, arXiv.
- On the Security Vulnerabilities of Text-to-SQL Models, arxiv.
- A novel specific artificial intelligence-based method to identify COVID-19 cases using simple blood exams.
- View this article in WRRO
- Grants
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Current Grants
- Distinguishing Common and Proper Nouns, Industrial, 03/2011 - 12/2025, £31,847 as PI
Previous Grants
- Automatically mapping and assessing inequalities in public health research, NIHR, 04/2021 - 12/2021, £48,764, as PI
- Institute of Coding, HEFCE, 11/2017 - 03/2021, £957,000, as Co-PI
- Digital Sensitivity Review, Industrial, 11/2018 - 03/2019, £39,880, as PI
- Data Analytics, Royal Academy of Engineering, 09/2017 - 09/2020, £30,000 as PI
- Recommendation Algorithm, Industrial, 04/2017 - 10/2017, £60,600 as PI
- HiDE: A Tool for Unrestricted Literature Based Discovery, Government, 01/2016 - 06/2016, £66,584 as PI
- InPuT: Individual Profiling using Text Analysis, Government, 09/2014 - 09/2015, £10,746 as PI
- Information Processing and Sensemaking: An Exploratory Search System for Document Collections, Government, 09/2014 - 08/2015, £77,840 as PI
- Connected Marketplace, Industrial, 01/2014 - 08/2014, £5,000 as PI
- PUMP: Developing a Data Set of Textual and Visual Topic Labels, EPSRC, 09/2013 - 10/2013, £1,540 as PI
- Language Processing for Literature Based Discovery in Medicine, EPSRC, 06/2012 - 05/2015, £293,127 as PI
- PATHS: Personalised Access to Cultural Heritage Spaces, EC FP7, 01/2011 - 12/2013, £709,407 as PI
- Lexical Disambiguation for the Biomedical Domain, EPSRC, 02/2007 - 01/2010, £239,920, as PI
- Professional activities and memberships
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- Area chair for EACL 2017 track ``Document analysis including text categorisation, topic models, and retrieval’’
Winner of best paper award at CLEF 2004 (with Roland Roller) - Keynote speaker at RANLP 2013
- Area chair for EMNLP 2013 track “semantics”
- Assistant Director of Advanced Computing Research Centre
- Co-ordinator of EU-funded project (PATHS)
- Member of ACL SIGLEX board (2010-2013 and 2013-2016)
- EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow (2006-2011)
- Member of editorial board of Computational Linguistics (2008-2010)
- Member of the Natural Language Processing research group
- Area chair for EACL 2017 track ``Document analysis including text categorisation, topic models, and retrieval’’