Cohort 2021

Sandrine Chausson

Research Interests:  Analysing the role of discourse in the formation, distribution and adoption of ideas using NLP, with applications for Social Sciences, History of Ideas and Moral Philosophy ; special interest in the Climate Change discourse and Identity Politics.

Research Topic:  The coming of age of a collective environmental conscience: tracing back the emergence and normalisation of environmental activism using Natural Language Processing

Supervisors: Björn Ross / Nadin Kokciyan

Gautier Dagan

Research Interests:  Arising and interpreting compositional structure in neural models.

Research Topic:  Embodied learning from language and interaction

Supervisors: Alex Lascarides / Frank Keller

Steph Droop

Research Interests:  How people infer the intentions of others.

Research Topic: Reasoning and decision models to capture unconstrained social explanations

Supervisors: Neil Bramley / Chris Lucas

Nick Ferguson

Research Interests:  Knowledge representation, automated reasoning, hybrid & compositional AI; explainable AI; safe and legal use of AI.

Research Topic:  Building Human-Aligned Explanations which take advantage of Meta-Level Reasoning in AI Systems

Supervisors: Kobby Nuamah / Alan Bundy / Mark Steedman / Liane Guillou

Balint Gyevnar

Research Interests:  Interrogating AI decision making through natural language.

Research Topic:  Building trustworthy autonomous vehicles using human-centric explainable AI

Supervisors: Stefano Albrecht /Chris Lucas / Shay Cohen

Coleman Haley

Research Interests:  Morphological representations in NLP tasks; morphology induction; neurosymbolic methods and structured representations; deep learning systems as cognitive models and psycholinguistic subjects.

Research Topic:  Self-supervised models of language ground cross-linguistic concepts

Supervisors: Sharon Goldwater / Frank Mollica

Wenyu Huang

Research Interests:  Knowledge graphs and knowledge representation learning; knowledge enhanced pre-trained language models, especially for response generation with conversational search queries.

Research Topic:   Knowledge Retrieval for Large Language Models

Supervisors: Jeff Pan / Ivan Titov

Anna Kapron-King

Research Interests:  Computational models of pragmatics and language evolution.

Research Topic:  Experimental investigations of regularities in semantic change

Supervisors: Simon Kirby / Kenny Smith

Amr Keleg

Research Interests:  Handling of low resourced dialects; Arabic NLP.

Research Topic:  Better Computational Distinction between the Varieties of Arabic

Supervisors: Walid Magdy / Sharon Goldwater

Oli Liu

Research Interests:  Computational models for unsupervised or minimally supervised learning of language from speech and/or text.

Research Topic:  Modeling speech perception with self-supervised learning models: encoding structures of phonetic, speaker, and context information

Supervisors: Sharon Goldwater / Hao Tang

Aida Tarighat

Research Interests:  Verbal and nonverbal communication; disfluency; emotion analytics; cross-lingual NLP.

Research Topic:  Written Disfluencies and Nonliteral Meaning Interpretation in Natural Language Processing

Supervisors: Martin Corley / Patrick Sturt

Nicholas Sanders

Research Interests:  Deep learning for speech synthesis, with a focus in personification and expressiveness; evaluation methods for speech synthesis; sequence to sequence modelling; contextual acoustic and phonetic feature representations.

Research Topic:  Controllable and Interpretable Prosody Modeling for Text to Speech

Supervisors: Simon King / Korin Richmond

Jonas Waldendorf

Research Interests:  Low Resource Neural Machine Translation focussing on Data Augmentation.

Research Topic:  Contrastive Decoding for Hallucination Reduction

Supervisors: Lexi Birch / Barry Haddow

Mengyu Wang

Research Interests:  Text-based financial prediction.

Research Topic:   Market attention-weighted  and ranking-based news aggregation network (mana-net):  a deep learning approach for stock prediction using news sentiments

Supervisors: Tiejun Ma / Shay Cohen