Research

My research has covered a broad range of topics in applied computational linguistics and natural language processing. They include: lexical semantics; the resolution of ambiguity in text; the analysis of authors’ styles in literature and other text (including plagiarism detection and the detection of online sexual predators) and the preservation of an author’s style in machine translation; recovering from misunderstanding and non-understanding in human-computer communication; linguistic constraints on knowledge-representation systems; the problem of near-synonymy in lexical choice in language generation; applications of lexical chaining as an indicator of semantic distance in texts; detecting markers of Alzheimer's disease in language; determining ideology in political texts; and the identification of the native language of a second-language writer of English. With colleagues in Canada, the U.K. and the Netherlands, I was a co-PI of a Digging Into Data grant on processing linked parliamentary data.