People at the ITRI

This page lists the members of the Institute in alphabetical order, with a brief paragraph describing their main interests. See also the "ITRI people at a glance" and individual home pages where listed.


Sue Atkins
home site
Sue is a Visiting Research Fellow at ITRI. In August 2000 she received an Honorary Doctorate from the University for her services to lexicography. She has been a professional lexicographer since 1966, first as General Editor of the Collins-Robert English-French dictionaries, then as Lexicographic Adviser to Oxford University Press. She has rganised and taught at many professional and academic training courses and workshops in lexicography. She is exicographical Adviser to the FrameNet project at the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, California. She has previously held lexicographic consultancies with the following research institutions: Lexical Systems Unit, IBM Hawthorne, New York; SRC Digital Equipment Corporation, Palo Alto CA; AT&T Bell Laboratories, NJ; Rank-Xerox Research Centre, Grenoble. She was a participant in the EC-supported research projects: EUROTRA-7 (computational lexicography); DELIS (DEscriptive LInguistic Specifications : computer-assisted lexical analysis and tool-building for corpus querying and data extraction); DECIDE (Automatic extraction of collocations from machine-tractable dictionaries and corpora); COMPASS (COMPrehension ASSistant : development of context-sensitive bilingual dictionary). She originated idea of the BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS. She is a Past President of EURALEX (European Association for Lexicography). Other interests: lexicographic analysis of corpus data; how lexical semantic theory can contribute to real-world dictionaries; the use of dictionaries.


Anja Belz
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Anja is a research fellow at ITRI. She has a PhD from Sussex University, and before starting at ITRI worked on the TMR Project Learning Computational Grammars at SRI International in Cambridge. Her research interests focus around Computational Natural Language Learning, and application areas she has looked at include finite-state grammars for phonology and morphology, and context-free grammars for shallow parsing. At ITRI she is working on the COGENT project, researching statistical NLG, and continuing previous research in Text Normalisation and PCFG Learning.


Catalina Barbu

Catalina is a research fellow working on the CLEF project.


Gabriela Cavaglia
Gabriela is a PhD student at ITRI. Her first degree was in Philosophy at the University of Turin, Italy. She did her B.A. thesis at IRST in Trento, Italy, on lexical resources for information extraction systems. Her research interests lie in lexical resources and word sense disambiguation.


Leigh Dodd

Leigh is the Institute's IT Manager. Before joining us he was the IT Manager at Raytheon Systems Ltd in Burgess Hill , and before that a software engineer in the School of Engineering at Sussex.


Roger Evans
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Roger is a reader at the Institute. His research interests include lexical description and representation, multilingual lexicons, information extraction, text parsing and generation and software tools. Roger received a DPhil from the University of Sussex, where he was also a research fellow before joining the Institute. He has been project manager and principal investigator on a number of EPSRC grants, and is a former holder of an EPSRC Advanced Fellowship.


Albert Gatt

Albert is an PhD student working within the TUNA project.


Martyn Haddock

Martyn is part of the Institute's administration team.


Jon Herring
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Jon is a PhD student at ITRI. He previously studied Modern Languages at Oxford and has an MA in Linguistics from the University of Essex. His research interests are phonological and morphological theory, inheritance-based lexical knowledge representation, and finite state techniques. His PhD is an exploration into how orthographic structure relates to phonological and morphological structures, and how they might be efficiently represented in the lexicon.


Adam Kilgarriff
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Adam is a senior research fellow working on the WASPS project. His research areas are dictionaries, corpora, and how they relate to each other. He is currently investigating the frequency distributions for various kinds of linguistic phenomena in corpora: the problems that word-sense ambiguity causes NLP, and how clever corpus-based tools might help the computational lexicographer. His doctoral thesis from the University of Sussex explores what it means for a word to have different meanings, in part through empirical examination of polysemy in dictionaries and corpora and in part through formal analysis of the lexical structures involved. Before joining the Institute, Adam worked for two years as a computational linguist with Longman's dictionary department, where he organised the shape of their dictionary database and corpus resources for lexicography.


Amy Neale
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Amy is the Institute's market development Analyst. She has a PhD on language generation at Cardiff, and previously worked on the EU-funded project called "EUROMAP Language Technologies".


Thapelo Otlogetswe

Thapelo is a PhD student, working in the area of corpus lexicography and lexical computing.


Daniel Paiva
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Daniel is a PhD student working on natural language generation in conjunction with the RAGS project.


Paul Piwek
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Paul is a research fellow in the Institute. He studied computational linguistics at Tilburg University and obtained a postgraduate degree in the philosophy of linguistics and cognitive science at the University of Amsterdam. From 1994 until 1998 he worked on his PhD at Eindhoven University of Technology. The title of his thesis is `Logic, Information and Conversation'. Paul joined ITRI on May 1, 1998. His principal research interests lie in the areas of dialogue modelling and anaphora resolution/generation.


Richard Power
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Richard is a principal research fellow in the Institute. His research interests are in natural language processing and expert systems, and he has also contributed to projects on computer-supported collaborative work and constraint logic programming. Richard did his PhD in AI at the University of Edinburgh, on a computer model of conversation between two agents who collaborate to achieve a practical goal. From 1975 to 1978, he was a research fellow at the University of Sussex, working on machine learning and automatic speech recognition. Prior to joining the Institute, he worked on financial expert systems in Italy.


Michael Rundell
home site
Michael is a Visiting Research Fellow at ITRI. He has been a professional lexicographer since 1980. He was Managing Editor at Longman Dictionaries (1984-94), responsible for recruitment and training of lexicographers, and for running major projects. He was Managing Editor of (among others) Longman Language Activator (1993), Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1987 and 1995 editions), and Longman Essential Activator (1997). He designed and ran lexicography training courses for Addison Wesley Longman in both the UK and US, and had a leading role in the design of lexicographic corpora (including the Longman Lancaster Corpus, Longman Learner Corpus and British National Corpus) and corpus enquiry tools. He is currently a freelance dictionary consultant and occasional teacher-trainer and lecturer. His interests include the phraseology of spoken English and the use of corpora as a resource for English language teaching. He is author of The Dictionary of Cricket and numerous papers on pedagogical lexicography.


Marina Santini
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Marina is a research student working on Automatic Genre Detection. Her research interests are in Genre Analysis, Cybergenres, Syntactic Features, Layout, exploitation of the Web as a corpus, Information Retrieval and Extraction.


Jason Teeple

Jason is a PhD student working on naltural algnuage generation as part of the COGENT project.


Donia Scott
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Donia is the head of the Institute and a professor of Computational Linguistics. Her current research interests are primarily in the areas of multilingual generation, discourse and pragmatics. She also engages in research on multimodal interfaces and on the perception of connected speech. She obtained an MSc in experimental psychology and a DPhil on intonational cues to sentence structure at the University of Sussex. Before joining the Institue in 1991, Donia was a research fellow at the Centre for Research in Cognition and Perception at the University of Sussex, a principal scientist at Philips Research Laboratories and a visiting professor at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Río de Janeiro, Brazil. Donia is currently Chair of the European Chapter of the ACL (EACL), and is a member of the executive committee of the ACL


Petra Tank

Petra is part of the Institute's administration team.


Kees van Deemter
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Kees is a principal research fellow in the Institute, who wrote a PhD on a topic in the formal semantics of natural language ("On the Composition of Meaning", University of Amsterdam 1991). He worked for Philips Research Laboratories and the Institute for Perception Research in the Netherlands and spent a postdoctoral year at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) in Stanford, California. His current interests include the structure of multimodal (text + pictures) documents, the logic of ambiguity and vagueness, and concept-to-speech generation. He joined ITRI in September 1997.


Sebastian Varges
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Sebastian is a research fellow on the TUNA project. He has a PhD from Edinburgh University where he worked on the BEETLE project before starting at ITRI. The title of his PhD thesis is "Instance-based Natural Language Generation". Before Edinburgh, Sebastian obtained an undergraduate degree from Saarbrücken University and a Master's degree from the University of Düsseldorf. His research interests focus on Natural Language Generation, combinations of rule-based and empirical approaches, and dialogue systems.


Yin Ling

Yin Ling is a new research student from China. She has a Master's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, completed in March 2002. For her Master's she was mainly engaged in research on a text analysis method for domain specific Chinese processing. She has also worked on Natural Language Generation for her Bachelor degree thesis work in the same university. She is currently determining her research topic.

Recent former members of the Institute


Nadjet Bouayad-Agha
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Nadjet worked as a research officer on the ICONOCLAST project among others and completed her PhD thesis at ITRI in 2001. Her research interests lie in natural language generation, corpus analysis and discourse. She obtained a masters degree (DEA) from the University of Paris 7 in 1997.


Lynne Cahill
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Lynne was a senior research fellow working on the RAGS and CLIME projects. Her principal research interests lie in the fields of computational lexicology, morphology and phonology. She received her DPhil from the University of Sussex, where she also worked on the POETIC project, involved in Information Retrieval. Lynne has recently completed the three-year ESRC funded PolyLex project at the University of Sussex, developing a trilingual lexicon of Dutch, English and German together with Gerald Gazdar. Lynne is now a research fellow in the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex.


Judy Delin

Judy is lecturer in the Department of English Studies, University of Stirling. Her main areas of interest are pragmatics and discourse, natural language generation, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics.


Barbara Di Eugenio
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Barbara is now an assistant professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her main areas of interest are computational semantics and discourse processing, with particular application to the interpretation and generation of instructional texts. Barbara received her PhD in Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, and following that worked in the Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh.


Alexandre Direne

Alexandre was a Visiting Fellow from the University of Parana in Brazil. His reseach area is Intelligent Tutorial Systems in the medical domain (e.g., radiography), and he spent a year with us exploring mutual interests on intelligent interfaces.


Christy Doran

Christy left ITRI in December 1999. At ITRI she was a research fellow working on the RAGS project. She received her PhD in Linguistics (Incorporating Punctuation into the Sentence Grammar: A Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar Perspective, 1998) and an MSE in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania. She received her BA from Wellesley College. Her research interests include lexicalized grammars for analysis and generation, grammar/lexicon development and organisation, integrating statistical and rule-based approaches, information extraction, and treating punctuation in NLP.


Markus Fischer
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Markus completed his PhD, entitled Automatic Generation of Spatial Configurations in User Interfaces (ITRI-99-02), in 1999. It focuses on temporal and spatial ordering of actions and objects in multimodal human-computer interaction. Markus obtained a masters degree from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. He has worked for several years at Symbolics Systems House on object-oriented software (such as data bases and user interfaces) using Artificial Intelligence tools, and was also a research assistant in the field of human-computer interaction at the German National Research Institute for Informatics (GMD).


Tony Hartley

Tony was on half-time secondment to the Institute for many years. He conducted conducting research on the design of authoring tools and the development of a computational systemic-functional grammar of French. His research interests include technical authoring in general and controlled language in particular. Tony obtained a BSc in French and Russian from Salford University and an MSc in Knowledge-Based Systems from the University of Sussex, where he then worked as a research fellow on a message understanding project. He has worked extensively with machine translation tools and as a French/English interpreter and translator. Tony is now a professor and head of the Centre for Translation Studies at Leeds University.


Rodger Kibble
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Rodger now lectures at Goldsmiths University, London. At ITRI he was a research fellow working on the RAGS project, with research interests in the application of formal and computational methods to natural language semantics. He joined the RAGS group in January 2000 after spending two years working on the GNOME project. He has an MSc in Knowledge-Based Systems from the University of Sussex and did his PhD at the Centre for Cognitive Science in the University of Edinburgh (`Anaphora Resolution in Dynamic Semantics', 1997). Prior to joining the ITRI in Jan 1998, he worked for 2 years on an EPSRC-funded project at SOAS in the University of London developing a logic-based incremental parser.


Rob Koeling

2002
Rob was a Research Fellow at ITRI, working on the final stages of the WASPS project. He now works in the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex.


Jenny Norris

Jenny completed her PhD, entitled The Generation of Compound Nominals to Represent the Essence of Text: The COMMIX System. Her thesis is concerned with the automatic generation of compound nominals from text abstracts. After obtaining a BSc in Genetics and Microbiology from University College, London (UCL), she spent several years teaching English as a foreign language in Italy, Spain and, finally, to immigrants in the UK. This experience made her interested in language, and she obtained a BA in Linguistics with Cognitive Science from the University of Sussex. She joined the Institute as a research assistant in 1991.


Sarah Oates

Sarah completed an MPhil at ITRI on the generation of multiple discourse markers in text. She now works for Elsevier Press in Oxford.


Ivandre Paraboni

Ivandre completed a PhD in natural language generation. His research interests are in reference phenomena (more specifically, references to parts of documents), deixis and the use of layout in NLG.


Simon Shurville

Simon received his PhD in July, 1999. His research interests include artificial intelligence, design theory, information design and person-computer interaction. He has developed commercial knowledge-based systems for purchasing entertainment products and acts as a design consultant in the multi media industry. His current research investigates how design theory can be codified to produce knowledge-aided design systems that will help designers to suggest structures for design teams. Simon studied audio-visual design at the Epsom School of Art and also obtained a BA in Computing with Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sussex.


Carole Tiberius
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Carole completed her PhD in multilingual lexical architectures in 2001. She had previously completed a masters at the University of Nijmegen, which included a six month placement at ISSCO, Geneva. Her research interests are in multilingual lexical representation, especially morphology. She now works in the Linguistics Department at the University of Surrey.


Neil Tipper

Neil was a research officer working on the RAGS and CLIME projects. He obtained a Master of Language Engineering from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. Prior to this he obtained a Maitrise (Batchelors degree) from the University of Paris 7 and a BTEC HNC in Software Engineering from Sheffield Hallam University.


David Tugwell
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David was a research fellow working on the WASPS project. His research interests centre on probabilistic approaches to natural language analysis, with a particular emphasis on modelling the syntactic process. He recently completed his PhD thesis, entitled "Dynamic Syntax", at the Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh, which argued for an incremental model of syntax and the abandonment of syntactic structures. Before Edinburgh, David took a BA in Russian and Chinese at the University of Leeds, an MSc in Knowledge-Based Systems at the University of Sussex, and was research assistant on the APRIL-II simulated annealing parser project also at Leeds.


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Last updated 15 December 2003

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