Cohort 2019

Laurie Burchell

Thesis Awarded 09.10.24:  Improving natural language processing for under-served languages through increased training data diversity

Supervisors: Lexi Birch; Kenneth Heafield

Ronald Cardenas

Thesis Awarded 20.03.24: Cognitive Structures of Content for Controlled Summarisation

Supervisors: Shay Cohen; Matthias Galle

Georgia Carter

Thesis Defended: Effects of context on semantic representations and mechanisms in humans and language models

Supervisors: Paul Hoffman; Frank Keller

Jie Chi

Research Interests: Machine learning; computational linguistics; speech recognition, with a focus on multilingual and low-resource language perspectives; natural language processing.

Research Topic: Code-switched ASR

Supervisors: Peter Bell; Catherine Lai

Hal C Conklin

Research Interests: Linguistic emergence, grounding, and evolution. Reinforcement learning, sequence learning, and representation learning. Cognitive, neural, and language modelling.

Research Topic: Linguistic Structure, Biases, And Generalisation In Neural Networks

Supervisors: Kenny Smith; Ivan Titov

Tom Hosking

Thesis Defended: Learning Weakly Structured Representations for Text-to-Text Generation

Supervisors: Mirella Lapata; Hao Tang

Parag Jain

Research Interests: Natural language generation and semantic parsing.

Research Topic: Conversational Semantic Parsing using Dynamic Context Graphs

Supervisors: Mirella Lapata; Ivan Titov

Faheem Kirefu

Research interests: Machine translation (in particular, low resource techniques) and natural language understanding.

Research Topic: Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning

Supervisors: Lexi Birch; Barry Haddow

Nina Markl

Thesis Awarded 16.11.23: Language variation, automatic speech recognition and algorithmic bias

Supervisors: Catherine Lai; Lauren Hall-Lew

Nicole Meng-Schneider

Research Interests: Usable security; looking at the privacy implications of voice-controlled interfaces, especially smart speakers, and the social impact of such systems.

Research Topic: OF SMART SPEAKER IN MULTI-USER SPACES

Supervisors: Nadin Kokciyan; Maria Wolters

Nikita Moghe

Thesis Awarded 13.08.24: Segment-level Evaluation of Machine Translation Metrics

Supervisors: Lexi Birch; Mark Steedman

Rimvydas Rubavicius

Research interests: computational semantics and pragmatics of embodied conversation, in service to interactive task learning.

Research Topic: Processing Embodied Conversation for Interactive Task Learning

Supervisors: Alex Lascarides; Ram Ramamoorthy

Rohit Saxena

Research interests: Machine learning, natural language processing, multimodal machine learning, computer vision.

Research Topic: Narrative Summarization using Content Selection

Supervisors: Frank Keller; Hao Tang

Emelie Van De Vreken 

Research Interests: Machine learning for speech synthesis and prosody modelling.

Research Topic: Voice Puppetry for Synthesis Control

Supervisors: Korin Richmond; Catherine Lai

Dan Wells

Research Interests: Investigating speech synthesis for low-resource languages through multilingual modelling, transfer learning and model adaptation in end-to-end neural network systems.

Research Topic: On Low-Resource Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Supervisors: Korin Richmond; Hao Tang

Irene Winther

Research Interests: Mechanisms of lexical activation, the organisation of the mental lexicon, semantic context, prediction, bi-/multilingualism and computational modelling.

Research Topic: Non-native lexical access: Insights from computational and behavioural approaches

Supervisors: Martin Pickering; Yevgen Matusevych