Professor Eric Atwell

Profile

I lead the AI4L Artificial Intelligence for Language research group: Nor Diana Ahmad, Zahed Ahmed, Mashael Alamr, Jawharah Alasmari,  Luluh Aldhubayi, Ayman Alghamdi, Abdulrahman Alosaimy, Mohammad Alqahtani,  Sameer Alrehaili, Menwa Alshammeri, Areej Alshutayri, Shatha Altammami, Claire Brierley, Juliana Jaafar, Zhiying Liu, Taghreed Tarmom. We are part of the Artificial Intelligence research theme of the School of Computing at the University of Leeds.

Academic career breaks from the University of Leeds

PhD research supervision

• S Altammami, due 2022, Parallel corpus and knowledge-base for Islamic Hadith
• T Tarmom, due 2022, Classifying Arabic Hadith
• M Alshammeri, due 2022, Deep learning and distributional semantics for the Quran
• M Alamr, due 2022, Authorship Attribution and Online Identity in Najdi Arabic Tweets
• J Alasamari, due 2020, Arabic and English verb systems in the Quran corpus
• N Ahmad, due 2020, Malay natural language processing for retrieval from Malay Qur'an
• A Alshutayri, 2019, Arabic dialects classification
• L Aldhubayi, 2019, Corpus-based methods and to extend Arabic WordNet
• A Alghamdi, 2018, Arabic corpus-informed lexicon of formulaic sequences
• M Alqahtani, 2019, Quranic Arabic semantic search tool based on ontology of concepts
• A Alosaimi, 2018, Ensemble morphosyntactic analyser for classical Arabic
• S Alrehaili, 2018, Ontology concept and relation learning from the Qur’an corpus
• J Jaafar, 2018, Data mining and machine learning to predict acute coronary illness
• A Alfaifi, 2016, Arabic learner corpus and a system for Arabic error annotation
• S Danso, 2016, Text analytics to predict time and cause of death from verbal autopsies
• K Dukes, 2013, Statistical parsing by machine learning from a Classical Arabic treebank
• S Hina, 2013, Semantic tagging of medical narratives using SNOMED CT
• A Muhammad, 2012, Annotation of conceptual co-reference and similarity in the Qur'an
• J Washtell, 2011, Distributional meaning in text: distance, expectation, and composition
• M Sawalha, 2011, Open-source resources and standards for Arabic word structure analysis
• C Brierley, 2011, Prosody resources for automated phrase break prediction
• O Nancarrow, 2011, Tagging of adverbs in modern English corpora
• F Su, 2010, Computational modelling of word sense sentiment
• N Abbas, 2009, Qurany 'Search for a Concept' tool and website
• A Roberts, 2008, Unsupervised machine learning for grammatical inference
• D Elliott, 2006, Corpus-based machine translation evaluation via automated error detection
• B AbuShawar, 2005, A corpus based approach to generalise a chatbot system
• L Al-Sulaiti, 2004, Designing and developing a Corpus of Contemporary Arabic
• T Oba, 2003, HTK to analyse prosody in the ISLE corpus of spoken learner's English
• J Elliott, 2003, Natural language learning for SETI Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
• X Duan, 2001, Lexical Semantic Association Between Web Documents
• G Churcher, 1997, Speech dialogue analysis using linguistic knowledge
• G Demetriou, 1997, Lexical semantics for human-computer speech communication.
• M Schillo, 1996, Working while driving: corpus-based in-car personal assistant
• X Zhang, 1996, MIRTH Chinese and English search engine: a multilingual retrieval tool
• C Souter, 1996, A corpus-trained parser for systemic-functional syntax
• A Bull, 1996, Aerobic dance exercise: a corpus-based computational linguistics approach
• U Jost, 1994, Probabilistic language modeling for speech recognition
• S Arnfield, 1994, Prosody and syntax in corpus-based analysis of spoken English
• J Hughes, 1993, Automatically acquiring a classification of words
• T O’Donoghue, 1993, Reversing the process of generation in Systemic Grammar

Responsibilities

• Artificial Intelligence for Language research leader

Research interests

My research speciality is Artificial Intelligence for Language research: AI applied in corpus linguistics and text analytics: Machine Learning and Data Mining analysis of a CORPUS of text - in English, Arabic, or other languages - to analyse the text and detect "interesting" and "useful" features or patterns. For example:

• Detecting terrorist activities, by analysis of documents from terrorist suspects, to highlight suspicious parts of the text.
• Analysis and text-mining of the Quran, to find links and patterns in the Quran verses and chapters whcih are of interest to Islamic and Religious Studies scholars.
• Detecting cause of death from verbal autopsy text documents describing the circumstances of the death.

I lead research projects, including the Leeds contribution to EPSRC-funded project Natural language processing working together with Arabic and Islamic Studies , EPSRC/ESRC/CPNI-funded 2.2M-pound research project IDEAS factory - detecting terrorist activities: making sense , JISC-funded project e-Health GATEwayto the Clouds , HEA-funded project to collect web-based resources for teaching and research in Islamic Studies .

I work with the Artificial Intelligence Research Theme and the Centre for Language @ Leeds (language@lists.leeds.ac.uk) and the LIDA Leeds Institute for Data Analytics.  See Guidelines on writing a successful PhD proposal, and my video clip.

I am proud of the c40 research students I have supervised, who went on to work in a range of careers, including web search, banking and finance, text analytics, translation and language consulting, online news, voice-to-text, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, and as University academics.

Qualifications

• PhD (Leeds) Corpus linguistics and language learning, 2008 http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/7504/
• BA 1st Class (Lancaster) Computing and Linguistics, 1981

Professional memberships

• EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Science Research Council) Peer Review College
• AHRC (Arts and Humanties Research Council) Peer Review College

Student education

My teaching includes: supervision of PhD, MSc and BSc student research projects; lecturing to Computing MSc, MEng and BSc students; and personal tutorials for students. I have also taught at international conference tutorials and summer schools, for example Aston Summer School on Corpus Linguistics, and Leeds International Summer School.

I have taught a range of subjects, including Data Mining, Text Analytics, Language, Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Knowledge Management and Adaptive Systems, Technologies for Knowledge Management, Corpus Linguistics, Object Oriented Programming, Professional Development, Knowledge Based Systems, Knowledge Discovery, Perceptual Systems, Future Directions in Distributed Multimedia Systems, Introductory Programming, Numerical Methods, Artificial Intelligence, Databases and Information Systems, Arabic Natural Language Processing.

Previous academic responsibilities

Research groups and institutes

• Applied Computing in Biology, Medicine and Health
• Artificial Intelligence