Our alumni
Tom Green
PhD Thesis: Using NLP to Resolve Mismatches Between Jobseekers and Positions in Recruitment
Supervisor: Dr Diana Maynard
Industry partner: Tribepad
Thesis examiners: Dr Mark Stevenson (University of Sheffield) and Dr Rudy Arthur (University of Exeter)
Viva date: 29 November 2023
Current employer: UK Government Department of Work and Pensions
Biography
Tom joined the CDT with a background in Psychology and Product Management. Keen to apply NLP techniques to live settings, Tom collaborated with recruitment software provider TribePad to investigate job recommendation and candidate ranking algorithms. He was supervised by Diana Maynard and Chenghua Lin.
PhD Summary
Recruiting through online portals has seen a dramatic increase in recent decades and it is challenging for jobseekers to evaluate the overwhelming amount of data to efficiently identify positions that align with their skills and qualifications. This research addresses this issue by investigating automatic approaches that leverage recent developments in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that search, parse, and evaluate the often unstructured data in order to find appropriate matches.
Impact
This research informs the early stages of the recruitment process when candidates are searching for jobs to submit an application for that align with their particular skills and experience. This research improves upon simplistic methods that are commonly used, by leveraging state-of-the-art NLP techniques that are able to learn from past application outcomes, and considering the semantic content of salient entities in candidate profiles and job descriptions. Jobseekers will benefit from this research in terms of a more appropriate ranking of the available jobs which will reduce the amount of data to review to find appropriate matches, and recruiting agents will benefit from this research in terms of more appropriate ranking of candidates which will reduce the amount of data to review to find appropriate matches.
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Will Ravenscroft
PhD Thesis: Speech Separation in Noisy Reverberant Acoustic Environments
Supervisor: Professor Thomas Hain
Industry partner: 3M Health Information Systems
Thesis examiners: Dr Yoshi Gotoh (University of Sheffield) and Prof Patrick Naylor (Imperial College London)
Viva date: 2 May 2024
Current employer: Bose
Biography
I got my start in academia in electronic engineering and mathematics. I also had a keen interest in audio signal processing. I came to Sheffield to dive deeper into the machine learning of audio processing with respect to speech. My thesis was focused on speech enhancement and separation technologies with a view to multi speaker speech recognition.
PhD Summary
Speech separation has seen significant advancements in recent years due to advanced deep learning techniques. However speech and reverberation still degrade the performance of these models. In this thesis, some inherent assumptions about the design of these models is challenged and a number new techniques for designing and training these models are proposed. These techniques result in improved model generalization, robustness and computational efficiency.
Impact
This thesis demonstrated the massive redundancies in some common approaches to speech separation research. It showed that performance of lightweight models can by improved by more intelligent analysis instead of massively increasing computational requirements. It also showed the same from the opposite end where large models contained significant redundancies because researchers had as yet failed to challenge preconceived notions about other model architectures.
The main benefit here is in the reduced training requirements for these models. Firstly, this is better for the environment which is better for society as a whole. Secondly, it demonstrates to researchers and practitioners they can save time and cost if they design their models more intelligently and take the time to challenge preconceived notions that have dominated this research field for many years now.
Links
Meg Thomas
PhD Thesis: A multidisciplinary investigation of conversation and disfluencies in cognitive decline
Supervisors: Dr Traci Walker and Professor Heidi Christensen
Industry partner: Apple
Thesis Examiners: Dr Stuart Cunningham (University of Sheffield) and Dr Leendert Plug (University of Leeds)
Viva date: 13 June 2024
Cohort 1 Student Representative
Viva passed with major corrections
Links
Peter Vickers
PhD Thesis: Navigating Multimodal Complexity: Advances in Model Design, Dataset Creation, and Evaluation Techniques
Supervisor: Professor Nikos Aletras and Dr Loïc Barrault
Industry partner: Amazon
Thesis Examiners: Dr Mark Stevenson (University of Sheffield) and Prof Yulan He (King’s College London)
Viva date: 7 June 2024
Current employer: AI Solutions Hub, Northeastern University, USA
Biography
Peter Vickers is a Computer Scientist specialising in Natural Language Processing and Multimodal AI. He completed his Ph.D. at The University of Sheffield, focusing on augmenting language models with multimodal information. His research enhances models' capabilities for tasks like Visual Question Answering and Text-to-Image Retrieval. Peter's Ph.D. was dual-funded by the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Speech and Language Technologies and an Amazon Studentship Grant.
Currently, Peter works as a Data Scientist at the AI Solutions Hub, Northeastern University, applying cutting-edge Machine Learning research to business problems. He has participated in JSALT summer workshops and interned as an Applied Scientist at Amazon UK. Peter holds an MSc in Computer Science with Speech and NLP from the University of Sheffield and a BA in English Language and Literature from Magdalen College, Oxford.
Outside of his academic pursuits, Peter is an avid backcountry skier, with experience in Norway and the High Arctic. He lead the 2024 UK Stauning Alps expedition to Eastern Greenland.
PhD Summary
My thesis explores how artificial intelligence systems can integrate information from diverse data types, ranging from highly structured knowledge graphs to unstructured images and text. We investigate this through three tasks: visual question answering, eye-tracking prediction, and citation recommendation. Our research focuses on developing novel multimodal AI models, creating diverse and diagnostic datasets, and improving evaluation metrics for complex classification tasks. We introduce the concept of "knowledge density" to categorize different data modalities and examine how models perform when combining information across this spectrum. Our work aims to advance multimodal AI systems' ability to reason with heterogeneous data sources for real-world applications.
Impact
The impact of this PhD project could be significant in several ways:
Improving AI assistants and search engines: By integrating knowledge from diverse sources more effectively, AI systems could provide more accurate and contextually relevant information to users. This could lead to improved virtual assistants, more intelligent search engines, and better information retrieval systems that the general public interacts with daily.
Enhancing accessibility technologies: The research on Visual Question Answering could contribute to developing more advanced systems for visually impaired individuals, allowing them to interact with their environment more effectively through AI-powered image description and question-answering tools.
Advancing educational technologies: The insights from eye-tracking prediction could be applied to create more effective e-learning platforms that adapt to individual reading patterns and comprehension levels, potentially revolutionising personalised education.
Boosting scientific research efficiency: The work on citation prediction could lead to improved literature recommendation systems for researchers, potentially accelerating scientific discovery by helping scholars find relevant work more easily.
Links
Danae Sánchez Villegas
PhD Thesis: Beyond Words: Analyzing Social Media with Text and Images
Supervisor: Professor Nikos Aletras
Industry supporter: Emotech
Thesis Examiners: Dr Carolina Scarton (University of Sheffield) and Prof Andreas Vlachos (University of Cambridge)
Viva date: 23 October 2023
Current employer: University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Links
Sebastian Vincent
PhD Thesis: Context-Based Personalisation in Neural Machine Translation of Dialogue
Supervisor: Dr Carolina Scarton
Industry partner: ZOO Digital
Thesis Examiners: Prof Nikos Aletras (University of Sheffield) and Dr Alexandra Birch-Mayne (University of Edinburgh)
Viva date: 28 November 2023
Current employer: ZOO Digital
Biography
I was born in Poland, moved to study in the UK in 2016. I have a BSc degree in Computer Science and AI. My PhD thesis is entitled "Context-Based Personalisation in Neural Machine Translation of Dialogue”. After the PhD I became an AI Research Scientist at ZOO Digital.
PhD Summary
My thesis explores personalisation of neural machine translation through the use of extra-textual information such as character and production metadata, in the domain of scripted dialogue. It puts forward a novel framework for working with such information and described an evaluation scheme for capturing how specific the queried translation (human or machine sourced) are to the provided context.
Impact
Through publications at reputable MT and NLP venues such as EAMT and ACL people learned about my work. My work has already been cited several times, and in some cases directly inspired applications built by other researchers. My published models and datasets have been downloaded hundreds and thousands of times, suggesting that many readers deeply engage with my work. My thorough investigation into the problem of extra-textual context in translation and progress made may have a positive impact on any industry or academic lab working with this kind of data.
ZOO Digital, my industrial partner who I am currently employed by, has expressed interest in my continuation of the project in my Research Scientist role in 2024. We will be working towards implementing an improved contextual machine translation system to help professional translators when working with scripted content.
My work was disseminated at multiple venues within and outside UK and has attracted interest of students and academics who enjoyed learning about my ideas. I believe my work could have inspired them in their own academic or professional endeavours.
Links
Guanyu Huang
PhD Thesis: My Fair Robot: Shaping a Mismatched Conversational Partner via Affordance Design
Supervisor: Professor Roger K Moore
Thesis Examiners: Dr Chaona Chen (University of Sheffield) and Dr Mary Ellen Foster (University of Glasgow)
Viva date: 19 December 2024
Viva passed with minor corrections
Links
Rhiannon Mogridge
PhD Thesis: An exemplar-informed approach to Speech and Language Tasks
Supervisors: Dr Anton Ragni
Thesis Examiners: Professor Roger K Moore (University of Sheffield) and Dr Sam Kirkham (Lancaster University)
Viva date: 7 November 2024
Industry partner: Toshiba
Links