Natural Language Processing
The Natural Language Processing Research Group, established in 1993, is one of the largest and most successful language processing groups in the UK and has a strong global reputation.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary field that uses computational methods:
To investigate the properties of written human language and to model the cognitive mechanisms underlying the understanding and production of written language (scientific focus)
To develop novel practical applications involving the intelligent processing of written human language by computer (engineering focus)
Research Themes
- Information Access
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Building applications to improve access to information in massive text collections, such as the web, newswires and the scientific literature
- Language Resources and Architectures for NLP
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Providing resources - both data and processing resources - for research and development in NLP. Includes platforms for developing and deploying real world language processing applications, most notably GATE, the General Architecture for Text Engineering.
- Machine Translation
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Building applications to translate automatically between human languages, allowing access to the vast amount of information written in foreign languages and easier communication between speakers of different languages.
- Human-Computer Dialogue Systems
- Building systems to allow spoken language interaction with computers or embodied conversational agents, with applications in areas such as keyboard-free access to information, games and entertainment, articifial companions.
- Detection of Reuse and Anomaly
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Investigating techniques for determining when texts or portions of texts have been reused or where portions of text do not fit with surrounding text. These techniques have applications in areas such as plagiarism and authorship detection and in discovery of hidden content.
- Foundational Topics
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Developing applications with human-like capabilities for processing language requires progress in foundational topics in language processing. Areas of interest include: word sense disambiguation, semantics of time and events.
- NLP for social media
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Social Media, Online Disinformation, and Elections: A Quantitative, "Big Data" Perspective.
- Biomedical Text Processing
Core members
Academic staff
- Prof. Nikolaos Aletras (Head of Group)
- Prof. Kalina Bontcheva
- Prof. Hamish Cunningham
- Prof. Rob Gaizauskas
- Dr Mark Hepple
- Dr Chenghua Lin
- Dr Nafise Sadat Moosavi
- Dr Carolina Scarton
- Dr Xingyi Song
- Dr Mark Stevenson
- Prof. Aline Villavicencio
- Dr Xi Wang
- Dr Cass Zhixue Zhao
Senior research staff
- Dr Diana Maynard (Deputy Head of Group)
- Research staff
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- Ibrahim Abu Farha
- Mehmet Bakir
- Dr Emma Barker
- Dr Mark Greenwood
- Dr Fatima Haouari
- Wei He
- Freddy Heppell
- Mali Jin
- Tashin Khan
- Joao Leite
- Yue Li
- Yida Mu
- Mugdha Pandya
- Olesya Razuvayevskaya
- Ian Roberts
- Iknoor Singh
- Xingwei Tan
- Jake Vasilakes
- Ahmad Zareie
- Visiting staff
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- Jonathan Foster
- Prof. Jochen Leidner
Publications
- Academic articles
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Here you can find research publications for the Natural Language Processing Research Group, listed by academic. The head link navigates to the official web page for the relevant academic (with highlighted favourite publications). The remaining links navigate to their DBLP author page, their Google Scholar citations page and optionally a self-maintained publications page.
Academic staff