Centre Directors
Head of the Speech and Hearing Research Group
Professor Hain is a world leader in speech recognition. He heads the LivePerson Centre for Speech and Language Technology and is a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).
"Talking and listening, understanding and expressive communication are skills that we all have. To this day we struggle to build machines that come close to human abilities.
"To explore and invent methods that allow us to recognise what is spoken, to understand, transform and interpret human communication has been the focus of my research. I am interested in machine learning methods that allow us to model communication and interaction, to be able to help people communicate, learn, and engage with new technology."
Examples of possible topics for supervision include:
Advanced modelling of speech processes.
Models of acoustic environments or of language.
Relationship between languages, and systems that transcribe spoken words, analyse them, transform the signal or the language.
Systems that respond to you and learn from you.
Natural Language Processing Research Group
Professor Gaizauskas is internationally known for his research on information extraction and text mining, temporal information processing, question answering and summarisation.
"Can we build we build computer programs that understand human language? This question is of interest from both a cognitive science and linguistic perspective, and from an applied engineering perspective.
"What are the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic mechanisms available in human languages and how do intentional agents deploy them to communicate and accomplish goals in the world?
"How can we use our current, partial understanding of NLP to engineer applications that help people to gain better access to information in massive amounts of textual data and to dynamically interact with intelligent agents via NL dialogue?"
Example of possible topics for supervision include:
Information extraction/text mining.
Automatic summarisation.
Semantic annotation of temporal and spatial information.
Automatic generation of image descriptions.
Common sense knowledge and NL understanding.
Task-oriented dialogue.
Independent Advisory Board
Professor Tanja Schultz (chair)
Bremen University, Germany
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, United Arab Emirates
Apple, UK and University of Crete, Greece
KU Leuven, Belgium
Queen Mary University (QMU), London, UK and University of Utrecht, Netherlands
Emeritus Independent Advisory Board Members
Sussex University, UK
Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland
Research Supervisors and Associated Academics
Supervisor and CDT Content Planning Group (CPG) member
Research interests:
Natural language processing;
Machine Learning for NLP;
Social Media Analysis;
NLP in the legal domain.
Supervisor
Research interests:
Noise-robust speech recognition;
Speech enhancement;
Hearing aid signal processing;
Perception of speech in noise;
Machine listening;
Acoustic scene analysis.
Visiting Academic and external supervisor
Research interests:
Statistical and neural machine translation including linguistics aspects (factored neural machine translation)
Considering multiple modalities (multimodal neural machine translation).
Supervisor
Research interests:
Analysis of online misinformation and bots;
Hate speech and online abuse detection;
NLP methods for social media analysis, open source tools, information extraction, text analytics, social media summarisation, ethics and privacy in social media research.
Supervisor
Research interests:
Machine hearing;
Auditory modelling;
Speech perception;
Hearing impairment;
Robustness to noise and reverberation;
Active hearing (eg, in robotic systems);
Clinical applications of speech technology.
Supervisor
Research interests:
Speech recognition for atypical voices;
Audio and speech processing for assistive technology;
Machine listening;
Conversational interfaces;
Pathological speech processing.
Supervisor
Research interests:
Language analysis infrastructure;
Text mining and textual big data processing;
Physical computing;
Micro-manufacturing;
Maker culture;
Raspberry Pi;
Privacy-preserving social media;
Crowdfunding.
Supervisor and CDT Content Planning Group (CPG) member
Research interests:
Speech processing;
Speech recognition;
Hearing loss;
Pattern recognition;
Acoustics;
Digital signal processing;
Acoustic signal processing;
Speech and language processing;
Signal processing;
Speech intelligibility.
Supervisor
Research interests:
Spoken language processing;
Audio visual processing;
Information retrieval from audio visual contents.
Director of Studies and Chair of CDT Content Planning Group (CPG)
Research interests:
Automatic speech recognition;
Auditory scene analysis;
Clinical applications of speech technology.
Supervisor
Research interests:
Computational linguistics and natural language processing including
formal grammar and parsing,
information extraction,
clinical text mining,
temporal information processing,
robust dialogue processing,
efficient storage of large-scale linguistic data.
Visiting Academic and external supervisor
Research interests:
Natural language processing and generation;
Text mining;
Representation learning;
Sentiment analysis;
Metaphor processing;
Dialogue systems.
Supervisor
Research interests:
Social media analysis;
Sentiment analysis;
News and information bias;
Semantic search;
Multidisciplinary work combining text analysis with behavioural and social information.
Supervisor
Research interests:
Spoken language processing;
Speech technology;
Voice-enabled agents/robots;
Vocal interactivity;
Speech perception and production;
Clinical and creative applications of speech technology.
Supervisor
Research interests:
End-to-end reasoning;
Robustness and generalisation;
Coreference resolution;
Text generation;
Sustainability;
Reliable evaluation.
Supervisor
Research interests:
Core speech recognition;
Efficient and expressive speech synthesis;
Spoken language translation;
Information retrieval;
Conversation modelling.
Supervisor and CDT Content Planning Group (CPG) member
Research interests:
Personalised NLP;
Test simplification;
Online content verification (misinformation detection);
Quality estimation of machine translation;
Document-level evaluation of NLP tasks outputs;
Readability assessment;
Automatic construction of computational lexical resources.
Supervisor
Research interests:
Natural Language Processing,
Computational Social Science,
Sentiment analysis
Bio-medical text processing
Supervisor and CDT Content Planning Group (CPG) member
Research interests:
Lexical semantics and analysis of word meanings (word sense disambiguation and lexical similarity);
Applications including medicine (text mining for systematic reviews, biomedical relation extraction, data mining and contradiction identification);
Document analysis (identification of text reuse, plagiarism and author identification);
Information extraction.
Visiting Academic and external supervisor
Research interests:
Lexical semantics;
Neural network word and phrase representation learning;
Word embeddings;
Multiword expressions;
Idiomatic, figurative and metaphorical language;
Language profiling in clinical conditions;
Multilinguality
Supervisor
Research interests:
Conversational AI
Natural language processing
Information retrieval
Recommendation systems
Supervisor
Research interests:
Model explanation
Model compression
Model bias and hallucination
Model reasoning
