I am Professor of Computational Linguistics in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London, where I am head of the Computational Linguistics Lab, deputy head of the Cognitive Science research group, a fellow of the Digital Environment Research Institute and a member of the Centre for Intelligent Sensing. I am also Višji Znanstveni Sodelavec (senior researcher) at the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Until recently (2023), I was a Turing Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute in London, and a member of the Academic Board for Ada, the National College for Digital Skills. Beyond academia, I co-founded Chatterbox Labs in 2011.
My main research interest is in the computational semantics and pragmatics of dialogue - using the context of a conversation to build models of what people are actually talking about. I have acted as an advisory board member for:
- SIGDIAL, the ACL/ISCA special interest group for discourse and dialogue
- SIGSEM, the ACL special interest group on computational semantics
- SEMDIAL, the series of workshops on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue.
I am acting as programme chair (with Yvette Graham) for EACL 2024, and was senior area chair (with Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha) for Dialogue & Interactive Systems at EACL 2023 and (with Verena Rieser) at EACL 2021. I have also been co-chair for the SLSP 2019 and IWCS 2015 conferences, and the CC-NLG 2016, ENLG 2015 and SemDial 2010 workshops. I have also been area chair for Dialogue & Interactive Systems at ACL 2016, for Discourse, Dialogue & Pragmatics at EMNLP 2013, and was local organiser for the SIGDIAL 2009 conference.
Before arriving at QMUL in 2009, I worked in the Computational Semantics Lab at CSLI, Stanford, on projects building an automatic meeting-understanding system and a conversational dialogue system for cars. Prior to that I did my PhD at King's College London with Jonathan Ginzburg, looking at clarificational dialogue and what it means for dialogue systems; and my BA and MPhil at Cambridge where I was lucky enough to be supervised by Karen Spärck Jones. In between, I spent 8 years as an engineer in the field of active noise & vibration control, mostly with Ultra Electronics and Noise Cancellation Technologies.