Research

Research interests

My current research focuses on NLP and its many real-life applications (ranging from text mining to machine translation and dialogue systems) and on the development of responsible and human-centric NLP / AI aimed at social and global good. 

Some current areas of interest include:

• human-centric NLP

• interpretability, explainability,  fairness and trustworthiness of NLP

• low resource NLP

• multilingual NLP

• dialogue systems and conversational AI 

• domain, task and language adaptation / transfer

• information extraction, text mining, knowledge discovery

• machine learning / deep learning 

• NLP for data science (e.g., biomedical and cognitive sciences)

• NLP for health

• real-world and responsible applications of NLP

Some of my current and past projects

• Towards Globally Equitable Language Technologies. ERC Advanced / UKRI Frontier Grant (2023-2028)

• Advancing cross-lingual transfer for conversational AI (2021-2023)

• MultiConvAI - Enabling Multilingual Conversational AI. Funded by ERC (2021-2022).

• Modeling Idiomaticity in Human and Artificial Language Processing. Funded by EPSRC (2020-2024).

• Building Multilingual Multi-Domain Dialogue Systems (2019-2023).

• ESG RoboFactory. Funded by Innovate UK (2020-2022).

• Automatic Induction and Adaptation of Syntactic Structures for Improved Cross-Lingual NLP.  Google Faculty Award (2019-2020).

• LEXICAL - Lexical Acquisition across Languages. Funded by ERC (2015-2021).

• EF Education First Research Lab for Applied Language Learning. Funded by Education First (2015-2020).

• LION - Literature-based discovery for cancer biology. Funded by MRC (2015-2018)

• PheneBank - automatic extraction and validation of a database of human phenotype-disease associations from the scientific literature. Funded by MRC (2015-2018)

• ENRICH - Enriched phrasal representations for improved language understanding. Google Faculty Award (2015-2016)

• The Education First-Cambridge Learner Corpus of English - a data driven approach to second language learning. Funded by EF and Isaac Newton Trust (2010-2015). 

• Developing Lexical Resources for Natural Language Processing Applications. University Research Fellowship. Funded by the Royal Society (2005-2014).

• PANACEA - Platform for Automatic, Normalized Annotation and Cost-Effective Acquisition of Language Resources for Human Language Technologies. Funded by EU FP7 (2010-2012).

• Lexical Acquisition for the Biomedical Domain. Funded by EPSRC (2009-2012).

• Developing Multilingual Technologies for Automatic Lexical Acquisition. Funded by Isaac Newton Trust (2010-2012). 

• CRAB - Using Text Mining to Aid Cancer Risk Assessment. Funded by MRC, EU and FSA and FORMAS in Sweden (2008).

• COMPLEX - Computational Natural Language Processing and the Neuro-Cognition of Language. Co-funded by EPSRC, ESRC and MRC (2008-2011).

• Developing Multilingual Technologies for Automatic Lexical Acquisition. Funded by British Council (2008-2009).

• ACLEX - Accurate and Comprehensive Lexical Classification for Natural Language Processing Applications. Funded by EPSRC (2005-2008).

• Using Automatic Verb Classification to Aid Event Extraction. JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship. Funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (2004-2005)