I have been working in NLP and AI for over 30 years.  Before joining the University of Cambridge on an EPSRC Experienced Researcher Fellowship (2015-2020) I spent the early part of my career in Japan (1996-2012).  I was a Toshiba Fellow, a postdoc at Tokyo University with Junichi Tsujii and Associate Professor at the (then) newly formed National Institute of Informatics  where I led the NLP lab for 12 years before returning to the UK on a Marie Curie Research Fellowship.  As an undergraduate I studied for a BSc. in Computer Science at the University of Leeds (1992).  I received an MSc in Machine Translation (1994) and a PhD in Computational Linguistics (1996) from the University of Manchester (UMIST) for my research on English-Japanese Lexical Transfer using a Hopfield Neural Network.  My current roles are Professor of NLP, co-leading the Language Technology Lab at Cambridge, Professorial Fellow at Murray Edwards College, and also Chief Scientist at Trismik, a spinout I co-founded and which launched in May 2025. 

My current work is concerned with understanding, aligning and evaluating large language models, including their use in agentic systems  (see recent publications on Google Scholar). I am particularly interested in supervising PhD projects that address fundamental questions about how models align with individuals and societies; how they develop richer representations of the world, including spatial, temporal and sensory understanding; and how we can understand and reliably evaluate their behaviour as they become more autonomous. This includes work on uncertainty, on- and off-policy evaluation of agent behaviour, and the safety and security of LLM-based agents. 

Prospective PhD students: I am always interested to supervise new NLP projects on the PhD in Computation, Cognition and Language.   Before contacting me please make sure that you meet the minimum requirements and take time to check out my publications.  The work we do in my team is technical and experiment-based so please apply only if you have strong programming skills.  In your email please send a CV with a brief statement of research interests.  Please note the application deadline and documents you need to submit with your application.  Note for 2027 applicants: I will accept 2 PhDs in 2027, and also the MPhil by Research in language sciences offers places to applicants with an NLP background. This can be a great springboard to PhD research.

Enquiries for postdoctoral opportunities are welcome.  When needed I can help explore funding sources for fellowships from UK, EU and other agencies. 

Over the years many people have contributed to the research and publications in my lab. Here's a list of current students, postdocs and alumni.