Professor Paul Rayson
Professor of Natural Language ProcessingWeb Links
Personal website: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/rayson/
Professional Role
Director of UCREL Research Centre
Research Overview
I am a Professor in Computer Science at Lancaster University, UK and Director of the UCREL interdisciplinary research centre which carries out research in corpus linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). A long term focus of my work is semantic multilingual NLP in extreme circumstances where language is noisy e.g. in historical, learner, speech, email, txt and other CMC varieties. Along with domain experts, I have applied my research in the areas of dementia detection, mental health, online child protection, cyber security, learner dictionaries, and text mining of biomedical literature, historical corpora, and financial narratives. I was 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 Institute Security Lancaster, the Lancaster Centre for Digital Humanities, and the Data Science Institute.
Career Details
Academic Qualifications:
2003 PhD, Computer Science, Lancaster University.
1990 BSc (Hons) Computer Science and Mathematics, Lancaster University.
Employment:
2020 – now Professor (School of Computing & Communications, Lancaster University)
2015 – 2020 Reader (School of Computing & Communications, Lancaster University)
2012 – 2015 Senior Lecturer (School of Computing & Communications, Lancaster University)
2012 – 2015 Director of International Teaching Partnerships (Faculty of Science and Technology, Lancaster University)
2009 – 2012 Lecturer (School of Computing & Communications, Lancaster University)
2008 – 2014 Director of Isis Forensics (now Relative Insight) Ltd., Infolab21, Lancaster University
2006 – 2007 Teaching Fellow (Computing Department, Lancaster University)
2006 – 2011 Director of The Research Engine Ltd., Infolab21, Lancaster University
2003 – now Director of UCREL Research Centre (Computing & Linguistics Depts, Lancaster University)
1997 – 2009 Research Fellow (Computing Department, Lancaster University)
1990 – 1997 Research associate/assistant (Computing Department, Lancaster University)
PhD Supervision Interests
I am interested in supervising PhD students in the following areas: contextual disambiguation methods for automatic semantic annotation and WSD, multilingual semantic tagging, applications of NLP to real-world problems.
Selected Publications
Towards Interactive Multidimensional Visualisations for Corpus Linguistics
Rayson, P.E., Mariani, J.A., Anderson-Cooper, B., Baron, A., Gullick, D.S., Moore, A., Wattam, S. 12/05/2017 In: Journal for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics. 31, 1, p. 27-49. 23 p.
Journal article
Creating and validating multilingual semantic representations for six languages: expert versus non-expert crowds
El-Haj, M., Rayson, P., Piao, S., Wattam, S. 3/04/2017
Conference contribution/Paper
Lancaster A at SemEval-2017 Task 5: Evaluation metrics matter: predicting sentiment from financial news headlines
Moore, A., Rayson, P.E. 4/08/2017
Conference contribution/Paper
A time-sensitive historical thesaurus-based semantic tagger for deep semantic annotation
Piao, S.S., Dallachy, F., Baron, A., Demmen, J.E., Wattam, S., Durkin, P., McCracken, J., Rayson, P.E., Alexander, M. 11/2017 In: Computer Speech and Language. 46, p. 113-135. 23 p.
Journal article
Word frequencies in written and spoken English: based on the British National Corpus.
Leech, G., Rayson, P., Wilson, A. 2001 London : Longman. 304 p. ISBN: 0582320070.
Book
From key words to key semantic domains
Rayson, P. 2008 In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. 13, 4, p. 519-549. 31 p.
Journal article
Experiments in 17th century English:: manual and automatic conceptual history
Pumfrey, S., Rayson, P., Mariani, J. 2010
Conference paper
Classification of Short Text Comments by Sentiment and Actionability for VoiceYourView
Simm, W., Ferrario, M., Piao, S., Whittle, J., Rayson, P. 2010
Conference contribution/Paper
Differentiating act from ideology: evidence from messages for and against violent extremism
Prentice, S., Taylor, P., Rayson, P., Giebels, E. 08/2012 In: Negotiation and Conflict Management Research. 5, 3, p. 289-306. 18 p.
Journal article
Safeguarding cyborg childhoods: incorporating the on/offline behaviour of children into everyday social work practices
May-Chahal, C., Mason, C., Rashid, A., Walkerdine, J., Rayson, P., Greenwood, P. 2014 In: British Journal of Social Work. 44, 3, p. 596-614. 19 p.
Journal article
Automatic standardisation of texts containing spelling variation: How much training data do you need?
Baron, A., Rayson, P. 2009
Conference contribution/Paper
All Publications
NLP Extraction, Analysis and Reasoning for Cyber Operational Risk Evaluation: NEAR-4-CORE
01/02/2024 → 15/12/2024
Research
DSI: Welsh Digital Grid
01/07/2023 → 29/03/2024
Research
DSI: Horizon Europe: 4D PICTURE: Design-based Data-Driven Decision-support Tools: Producing Improved Cancer Outcomes Through User- Centred Research
01/10/2022 → 30/09/2027
Research
Understanding imprecise space and time in narratives through qualitative representations, reasoning, and visualisation
01/04/2022 → 30/06/2026
Research
DSI: FreeTxt: supporting bilingual free-text survey and questionnaire data analysis
01/03/2022 → 31/10/2023
Research
DSI: Realist evaluation of online mental health communities to improve policy and practice
01/03/2022 → 31/12/2024
Research
The Igbo-English Machine Translation Project
03/02/2020 → 29/01/2021
Research
BioTM Project
01/05/2018 → 31/03/2019
Research
Analysing Narrative Aspects of UK Preliminary Earnings Announcements and Annual Reports: Tools and Insights for Researchers and Regulators
01/12/2017 → 31/07/2020
Research
Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare's Language
01/05/2016 → 31/10/2019
Research
The National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh
01/03/2016 → 31/08/2019
Research
Native Language Influence Detection 6 Project
23/11/2015 → 31/10/2018
Research
Geospatial Innovations in the Digital Humanities: A Deep Map of the English Lake District
19/10/2015 → 19/10/2018
Other
SenseSourcing
01/12/2014 → 01/07/2015
Other
Understanding Corporate Communications
01/12/2014 → 01/10/2016
Other
VardSourcing
01/12/2014 → 01/07/2015
Other
Semantic Annotation and Mark Up for Enhancing Lexical Searches (SAMUELS)
01/01/2014 → 31/03/2015
Research
Software Architecture for Mental health Self management
01/04/2013 → 30/09/2016
Research
ESRC centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science - CASS
31/03/2013 → 30/03/2018
Research
Understanding the Influences of Financial Reporting, Corporate Disclosure and financial media on the Corporate Financial Information Environment
01/12/2012 → 30/11/2014
Research
Metaphor in End of Life Care
01/09/2012 → 28/06/2014
Research
FP7: Spatial Humanities
01/01/2012 → 31/12/2016
Research
Corpus Research in Early Modern English
01/10/2011 → …
Research
FP7: iCOP
01/06/2011 → 30/11/2013
Research
FP7: CLARIN
01/01/2008 → 30/06/2011
Research
Variability in child language
01/04/2007 → …
Other
Using a semantic annotation tool for research on metaphor in discourse
01/12/2005 → …
Research
Changing English across the 20th Century: A Corpus-based Study
01/08/2005 → 31/07/2007
Other
ASSIST: Automated Semantic Assistance for Translators
01/04/2005 → 30/06/2007
Other
Semantic Annotation
Invited talk
EACL Student Research Workshop (Event)
Publication peer-review
Corpus Linguistics (Event)
Publication peer-review
Sixth International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts held in conjunction with the 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (Event)
Publication peer-review
Healthcare text analytics conference 2023 (Event)
Publication peer-review
Language, Data and Knowledge (Event)
Publication peer-review
What can you do with the CLARIN research infrastructure?
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Spatial Humanities: Finding spatial and time narratives in corpus data
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Event)
Publication peer-review
Methods and applications for multilingual semantic analysis
Invited talk
Methods and resources for multilingual semantic taggers
Invited talk
Multilingual semantic tagger
Invited talk
An exploratory analysis of the relationship of posting in peer online support forums and trait mood in bipolar disorder
Oral presentation
The 4th Financial Narrative Processing Workshop
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Methods and applications for semantic tagging
Invited talk
Text2Story 2022 (Event)
Publication peer-review
13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (Event)
Publication peer-review
International Conference for Learner Corpus Research (Event)
Publication peer-review
ParlaCLARIN III at LREC2022 (Event)
Publication peer-review
10th Workshop on the Challenges in the Management of Large Corpora (Event)
Publication peer-review
Corpus Approaches to Lexicogrammar (Event)
Publication peer-review
The 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Event)
Publication peer-review
The Third Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (Event)
Publication peer-review
Financial Narrative processing conference 2021
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Bipolar disorder and recovery on Reddit: a corpus linguistic analysis
Oral presentation
The 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Event)
Publication peer-review
EACL Student Research Workshop (SRW) 2021 (Event)
Publication peer-review
NAACL Student Research Workshop (SRW) 2021 (Event)
Publication peer-review
The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Event)
Publication peer-review
9th Workshop on the Challenges in the Management of Large Corpora (Event)
Publication peer-review
The 1st Joint Workshop on Financial Narrative Processing and MultiLing Financial Summarisation
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (Event)
Publication peer-review
International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME) conference (Event)
Publication peer-review
8th workshop on "Challenges in the management of large corpora" (Event)
Publication peer-review
AACL-IJCNLP 2020 Student Research Workshop (Event)
Publication peer-review
The 2nd Financial Narrative Processing Workshop
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
The 3rd Workshop on Arabic Corpus Linguistics
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Talking about personal recovery in bipolar disorder
Oral presentation
Twenty eight years of semantic tagging
Invited talk
A whistle stop tour of Natural Language Processing and Corpus Linguistics methods and applications
Invited talk
5th Learner Corpus Research Conference (Event)
Publication peer-review
28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Event)
Publication peer-review
The 10th International Corpus Linguistics Conference (Event)
Publication peer-review
ACL Student Research Workshop (SRW) (Event)
Publication peer-review
Shared Task on the Reproduction of Research Results in Science and Technology of Language (Event)
Publication peer-review
7th workshop on "Challenges in the management of large corpora" (CMLC-7) (Event)
Publication peer-review
Corpus Approaches to Lexicogrammar (LxGr) (Event)
Publication peer-review
Using CorCenCC: Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes – National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
The 1st Financial Narrative Processing Workshop in LREC 2018
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
SCC (Data Science), UCREL - University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language
SCC (Data Science), UCREL - University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language
- Cyber Security Research Centre (Data)
- Digital Health Group
- DSI - Foundations
- DSI - Health
- Lancaster Centre for Digital Humanities
- Lancaster Intelligent, Robotic and Autonomous Systems Centre
- LIRA - Fundamentals
- SCC (Data Science)
- Security Lancaster
- Security Lancaster (Academic Centre of Excellence)
- Security Lancaster (Behavioural Science)
- UCREL - University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language