LANGUAGE RESEARCH GROUP
Language research in Computing is also known as Natural Language Processing , Computational Linguistics , or Language Engineering . Central to our research is the computational modelling of language data; a CORPUS is a text dataset representative of the language to be analysed. Our research at Leeds University focusses on bootstrapping linguistic knowledge and resources from text, and is reported in our PUBLICATIONS. Language Research Group graduates have gone on to work in Web search, text analytics, translation and language consulting, online news, voice-to-text, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and, of course, as University academics !
Academic Staff
![]() |
Eric Atwell Corpus Linguistics, Machine Learning and Data Mining from text, chatbots and their applications, Arabic language processing, international English, morphosyntactic tagging, evaluation. PUBLICATIONS. |
![]() |
Katja Markert Data-intensive, corpus-based and web-based natural language processing, Anaphora Resolution, Figurative Language Resolution, Textual Entailment, Sentiment Analysis. PUBLICATIONS. |
We collaborate with academic staff in the Centre for Translation Studies :
![]() |
Tony Hartley
Evaluation of machine translation systems, Controlled languages, Natural Language Generation, Quality in translation and interpreting, Computer Supported Collaborative Working. PUBLICATIONS |
![]() |
Serge Sharoff
Corpus linguistics, Natural Language Understanding, Natural Language Generation, Lexical semantics, Systemic-Functional grammar. PUBLICATIONS |
Research Students
| STUDENT | RESEARCH TOPIC |
|---|---|
| Noorhan Abbas | Qurany: A Tool to Search for Concepts in the Quran |
| Amal Alsaif | An Automatic analyser of Discourse structure for Arabic |
| Claire Brierley | Corpus-based evaluation of prosodic phrase break prediction |
| Svitlana Kurella | Methodology for computer-assisted acquisition of reading abilities in L3 |
| Andrew McKinlay | Predictive Opinion Mining |
| Owen Nancarrow | A Comparative Study of the Tagging of Adverbs in Modern English Corpora |
| Andy Roberts | Grammatical Inference and Corpus linguistics |
| Alina Secară | Developing a semi-automatic subtitler's workbench within the systemic functional grammar framework |
| Majdi Sawalha | Automatic Part-of-Speech Tagging of Arabic Language Text |
| Abdul-Baquee Sharaf | A Computational Model for Knowledge Representation of the Quran |
| Fangzhong Su | Computational Modelling of Word Sense Sentiment |
| Martin Thomas | Localising Pack Messages |
| Josiah Wang | Computer Vision, Scene Understanding & Object Classification/Recognition |
| Justin Washtell | The benefits of proximity as opposed to frequency as a basis for modelling language |
| Russell Wilson | Towards a Linguistically Informed Kansei Engineering |
Potential research partners and PhD students are very welcome to contact any of the academic staff (Atwell, Markert, Hartley, and Sharoff). Please send us an outline project proposal (see guidelines and example project ideas). You can apply for a PhD online.
Language research seminars at Leeds University
and links to related Leeds University research groups in
Knowledge Management,
Translation Studies,
Linguistics and Phonetics,
Modern Languages and Cultures,
Language Education,
English.




