My research activities lie within the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). In the 1980s and 90s, primarily in collaboration with Aravind Joshi and Vijay Shanker, I established seminal results in the theory of natural language grammar formalisms and parsing. More recently, as data-driven approaches became more widespread, I worked in the areas of dependency parsing and distributional semantics.

I have served on the editorial board of the journal Computational Linguistics, and been an area chair for the field’s key conferences on several occasions. I has been the Principal Investigator on four EPSRC-funded research projects, one ESRC-funded research project, four InnovateUK funded projects, one Police Knowledge Fund, one National Science Foundation funded project and numerous funded research collaborations involving charities, businesses and government.

In the summer of 2010, Jeremy Reffin and I established the Text Analytics Group (TAG), a research lab in the Department of Informatics that focuses on commercially relevant applications of NLP, and is now a group of 17 researchers. In addition to undertaking research in Applied NLP, the express intention of the TAG Laboratory is to create a significant impact on the region by providing support, technology, and highly-trained specialists to a new generation of technology companies.

In 2012, in collaboration with researchers at Demos Think Tank and several members of TAG, we established the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM).