I am director of the UCREL research centre and a Reader in the School of Computing and Communications, in the Infolab21 building at Lancaster University in Lancaster, UK. A long term focus of my work is the application of semantic-based NLP in extreme circumstances where language is noisy e.g. in historical, learner, speech, email, txt and other CMC varieties. My applied research is in the areas of dementia detection, online child protection, cyber security, learner dictionaries, and text mining of historical corpora and annual financial reports. I am a co-investigator of the five-year ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) which is designed to bring the corpus approach to bear on a range of social sciences. I'm also a member of the multidisciplinary centre Security Lancaster, and Lancaster Digital Humanities, and the Data Science Institute.

Teaching (2016-17):

• SCC312: Languages and Compilation

• I'm currently supervising eight students: Matt Coole (co-supervised with John Mariani), Matt Edwards (co-supervised with Awais Rashid), Laura Löfberg (co-supervised with Andrew Wilson), Andrew Moore (co-supervised with Steven Young), Alex Reinhold (co-supervised with Ian Gregory), Jawad Shafi, Muhammad Sharjeel (both co-supervised with Adeel Nawab), and John Vidler (co-supervised by Andrew Scott).
• Seven of my students have completed: Alistair Baron (Dealing with spelling variation in Early Modern English texts); Eddie Bell; Ricardo Gacitua (OntoLancs: an evaluation framework for ontology learning by ensemble methods); Katharina MacInnes; Sheryl Prentice; (both co-supervised with Paul Taylor) Patrick Tschorn (Incremental inductive logic programming for learning from annotated corpora); and Stephen Wattam (joint with Maths and Stats, previously co-supervised with Damon Berridge).

Major research projects and activities:

• The ESRC-funded £3.5m Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS)
• Corporate Financial Information Environment (CFIE)
• Corpus Database Project (CDP)
• CorCenCC (Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes / The National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh)
• Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities: A Deep Map of the Lake District
• iCop: Identifying and Catching Originators in P2P Networks
• Metaphor in end-of-life care (MELC)
• Native Language Influence Detection 6 (NLID6)
• Protecting children in online social networks
• Semantic Annotation and Mark-Up for Enhancing Lexical Searches (SAMUELS)
• Software Architecture for Mental health Self management (SAMS)
• Spatial Humanities: Bringing Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to the Digital Humanities
• Understanding Corporate Communications
• Variant spellings: in Early Modern English
• Until 2015, I co-edited the Corpora Journal published by Edinburgh University Press.
• InfoLab21 BlogSpot: Can search engines count? (September 2012)
• I co-edit the Routledge Frequency Dictionaries Series along with Mark Davies (Brigham Young University).
• English word frequency lists (free to download)
  
• BNC index web interface
  

• CLAWS English POS tagging
  
• UCREL semantic analysis system (USAS) (not just English anymore!)
• Wmatrix corpus analysis and comparison tool (for English for the moment)
• Collocate cloud visualisation tool: (CONE) (released September 2010) and now moved to GitHub
• Statistical significance (Log-likelihood) and effect size calculator
• Alistair Baron's Variant Detector (VARD)

• There's more information about my academic research and publications on separate pages.
• I used to go to school at Toot Hill in Bingham, Notts and some of my ancestors lived in Rutland.