Research Interests
I am a Senior Lecturer and a member of the Language and Computation Group (LAC) here at Essex (most recent LAC Day: 7th October 2011: 10th LAC Day, or have a look at the previous LAC day).
My research interests are in natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval (IR) and the implementation of such techniques in real applications. The intelligent directory enquiry assistant (YPA) project is an example where the extraction of information from partially structured data together with engineering issues played major roles in making the YPA a usable online system.
I am developing techniques that allow the extraction of conceptual information from document collections and the utilization of such knowledge in retrieval tasks. The type of documents can range from Web pages to newspaper articles or other forms of vaguely/partially structured data. You can see these methods in action by trying out the University of Essex search engine (any feedback welcome!)
We are also exploring how to implement and use such techniques in future intelligent home environments. This work is carried out as part of the research in the Digital Lifestyles Centre here at Essex.Current Projects
-
Automatic Adaptation of Knowledge Structures for Assisted Information Seeking (AutoAdapt), a project involving the
School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Robert
Gordon University Aberdeen and the Open
University.
This project aims to develop and evaluate methods for adapting automatically
constructed domain models to the population of users' search or browsing
behaviour. Application and large-scale evaluation of the developed methods in
two information seeking scenarios - namely, interactive search and browsing -
will be performed on a number of domains. _ _
-
Creating anaphorically annotated resources through semantic wikis (AnaWiki)
(EPSRC) This project has led to the development of Phrase Detectives, an
annotation game aimed at the creation of semantically annotated corpora:
Recent Research/Development Projects
- Development of a career path framework, a project involving the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering and JobServe, the world's first Internet Recruitment Service.
- Development of an intelligent mail server, a project involving the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering and Active Web Solutions (AWS), an Ipswich based company devoted to cutting edge enterprise information systems.
- Learning Disabilities Data and Information Infrastructure Project (ESRC)
- Markup-Based Knowledge Extraction Project (EPSRC)
- Intelligent Directory Enquiry (YPA) Project (BT)
Current/Recent Involvements
(Committee member)
Spring 2012 IRSG newsletter!
-
SIGIR 2012 Industry Track (Co-Chair)
Call for Industry Track Proposals (deadline 7 May 2012)!
(check here for the same call in letter format) - IIiX 2012 (Programme Committee)
- ECIR 2012 Industry Day (Programme Committee)
- ECIR 2012 (Programme Committee)
- ECIR 2012 Workshop on Information Retrieval Over Query Sessions (SIR2012) (Programme Committee)
- IRF Conference 2012 (Programme Committee)
- NAACL Student Research Workshop and Doctoral Consortium 2012 (Programme Committee)
- EACL 2012 Joint Workshop on Information Retrieval and Hybrid Machine Translation (Programme Committee)
- LREC 2012 Workshop on Creating Cross-language Resources for Disconnected Languages and Styles (Programme Committee)
- IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence 2012
(Programme Committee)
- STAIRS 2012 (Programme Committee)
-
Search Solutions 2011 (Co-Organiser)
- ECIR 2011 Industry Day (Co-Chair)
- ECIR 2011 (Programme Committee)
- Future Directions in Information Access (FDIA) 2011 (Programme Committee)
- WWW 2011 (Programme Committee, Content Analysis Track)
- IRF Conference 2011 (Programme Committee and Invited Panelist)
- ACL HLT 2011 Student Session (Programme Committee)
- ACM Hypertext Workshop on Personalised Multilingual Hypertext Retrieval (PMHR 2011) (Programme Committee)
- IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence 2011
(Programme Committee)
-
Search Solutions 2010 (Co-Organiser)
Missed it? Read our article in ITNow - ACM CIKM 2010 (Demo Co-Chair)
-
ECIR 2010 (Programme Co-Chair)
Missed the conference? Conference report in SIGIR Forum - ECIR 2010 Industry Day (Co-Organiser)
- IIiX 2010 (Programme Committee)
- ECAI 2010 (Programme Committee)
- STAIRS 2010 (Programme Committee)
- IRF Conference 2010 (Programme Committee)
- ACL 2010 (Programme Committee)
- ACL 2010 Student Research Workshop (Programme Committee)
- RANLP 2009 (Programme Committee)
- MinUCS 2009 (Programme Committee)
- ICTIR 2009 (Programme Committee)
- Future Directions in Information Access (FDIA) 2009 (Programme Committee)
- NODALIDA 2009 (Programme Committee)
- Special Issue of the Journal Of Natural Language Engineering on Interactive QA 2009 (Guest Editorial Board)
- Corpus Profiling Workshop 2008; co-located with Information Interaction in Context (IIiX 2008) (Organising Committee)
- ECML/PKDD Workshop on High-level Information Extraction 2008 (Programme Committee)
- Future Directions in Information Access (FDIA) 2008 (Programme Committee)
- Flatlands 2008 (Organising Committee), organised by the Essex Language and Computation Group
- ECIR 2008 (Programme Committee)
- SIGIR 2007 (Demonstration Committee)
- RANLP 2007 (Programme Committee)
Teaching (2011/12)
Publications
- Selected Publications
-
Springer Book: "Intelligent
Document Retrieval"
- Review of the Springer book by Informer (Newsletter of the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group IRSG)
- Review of the Springer book by ACM Computing Reviews
