LINGUIST List 5.3

Sat 01 Jan 1994

FYI: New Program: Natural Language and Speech Research, Sheffield

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1. Yorick Wilks, New Program: Natural Language and Speech Research at U. of Sheffield

 Natural Language and Speech Research
 at the
 University of Sheffield Department of Computer Science

The Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield
has established a strong emphasis on and expertise in speech and
language processing, and seeks applications from students who
want to study for doctoral degrees and perhaps apply for graduate
studentships. Sheffield is specifically interested in Natural
Language Engineering and has just established ILASH (the Insti-
tute for Language, Speech and Hearing) linking researchers in
more than ten departments.

The University also has an interdisciplinary program in Cognitive
Science and a strong program in Japanese. We have B.Sc. and
M.Sc. degrees in Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence and
Speech and Language Processing, as well as the join of Language
Processing and Information Retrieval.

Sheffield has a number of funded projects in speech and language
processing. Such projects are funded by SERC, the European Com-
munity and the USA. We have also received a Human Capital and Mo-
bility (HCM) award for research in speech processing. We are a
node on Europe's ELSNET (European Language and Speech Network)
and will run the British Conference on Artificial Intelligence
(AISB-95) in 1995. In 1994 we will run two workshops at AAAI on
the integration of speech, vision and language.

There are at least 15 staff in the Department of Computer Science
involved in language and speech processing, with substantial ex-
perience in the area and good research facilities:

Guy Brown:
auditory models, sound source separation, audition, speech

Martin Cooke:
auditory models, sound source separation, audition, speech

Malcolm Crawford:
auditory models, sound source separation, audition, speech

Robert Gaizauskas:
logical models of natural language texts, information
extraction from corpora

Phil Green:
speech processing, neural network models of speech processing,
ai approaches to speech processing

Mark Hepple:
formal models of grammar, categorial grammars, parsing,
cognitive models

Mike Holcombe
formal models of NLP, formal models of user modelling

Jim McGregor:
user modelling, parsing, Prolog, tutoring systems

Paul Mc Kevitt:
pragmatics, natural language dialogue, user-computer interfaces,
hyper/multimedia, user modelling, integration of speech,
language and vision processing

Bob Minors
Modelling arguments in discourse, illogic of argumentation,
belief processing

Amanda Sharkey:
Connectionist and cognitive models of language processing

Noel Sharkey:
Connectionist and cognitive models of language processing.

Tony Simons:
machine translation, syntactic parsing, chart parsing, object-oriented
parsing

Yorick Wilks:
artificial intelligence, natural language
understanding, belief pragmatics, lexical computation,
parsing, text extraction.

Sheila Williams:
phenology, pragmatics and intonation, hearing, speech processing

Enquiries and expressions of interest should be sent to:

Professor Yorick Wilks
Regent Court,
211 Portobello Rd.,
Sheffield, S1 4DP,
Sheffield, England.
yorickdcs.sheffield.ac.uk