Current position

I am a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science in Royal Holloway University of London.

Research interests

A very brief research narrative: the majority of the papers I have written are to do with unsupervised learning of natural language, and its relevance to first language acquisition. I have approached this both theoretically and practically: trying to define what a good definition of learnability is, trying to prove that you can learn languages according to various models of learnability, designing algorithms, and writing computer programs that can learn models of language both from synthetic and natural examples.

In the last few years I have been looking at formal results. If a learning algorithm works at all, then it should be possible to identify a class of languages, and some conditions such that you can prove that the learner will acquire that class under those conditions.

I have published some papers on learning regular languages and finite automata, which are summarised on this page.

I won the Omphalos competition, and the Tenjinno competition, which were two grammatical inference competitions in learning context free grammars and transductions, respectively.

Recently I have been working on learning context free and context sensitive languages, using some ideas from structural linguistics. The most recent paper on this is about to appear in the post-proceedings of FG-2009. The pre-publication version of this is available here.

History

Before arriving here I was a post-doc at ISSCO, at the University of Geneva working on the IM2 Project, a large Swiss project on Multimodal Information Management.

My first degree was in Mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge. My Ph.D. is from the University of Sussex.

Current Activities

I am co-editor of a special issue of the journal Research on Language and Computation. The CFP can be found here.

I am one of the editors, with Chris Fox and Shalom Lappin of Blackwell's "Handbook of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing", in preparation. If you are a contributor to this book, you can access the wikipage here. This will appear in 2010.

I will be teaching a course at ESSLLI 2010. This will be called Learnable representations of languages.

I am reviewing this season for ECAI, ICML, NAACL-HLT, and a few other conferences.

Recent Activities

I was one of the organizers of a workshop at NIPS 2009: Grammar Induction, Representation of Language and Language Learning.

I was co-chair of ICGI 2008, and of CoNLL 2008.

With Nick Chater, I organised a workshop on cognitive science and machine learning in London 21-22 June 2007. The website for that is here. The videos are online here.

Downloads

Code for POS induction here from the paper at EACL 2003 on distributional and morphological learning.

Publications

Look on my publications page for copies of any of these, or for abstracts on this page.

Video

Some videos of research talks are available on the web.

My tutorial at the NIPS 2009 workshop: (slightly rushed!)

Learnable Representations for Natural Language

A talk at ICGI 2008:

A polynomial algorithm for the inference of context free languages

Teaching

In Autumn 2009, I taught Computer Games Technology (CS3230). The page for this is here.

Office Hours

This term I am not keeping office hours as I am not teaching. If you want to see me, email me for an appointment or knock on my door.

Last modified 25 January 2010.