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.

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.

Personal website: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/rayson/ 

Director of UCREL Research Centre

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) 

Journal editorships:

1. Production editor of Corpora published by Edinburgh University Press (1^st issue 2006).
2. Production editor of ICAME published by the University of Bergen, Norway (since April 2006).

Book Series Editorship:

1. Co-editor (with Mark Davies, Brigham Young University) of Routledge Frequency Dictionaries.

Memberships:

1. Advisory boards for ICAME (International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English) and JISC Historic Books.
2. Professional memberships: IEEE Computer Society, ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics), ALLC (Association for Literary & Linguistic Computing), British Computer Society

Recent conference and workshop organisation:

1. (k) Workshop on Corpus Linguistics & Machine Translation Applications (August 12-13 2008, CCID, Beijing, P.R. China), (l) eLexicography in the 21st century (22-24 October, 2009, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium), (m) 30th Annual Conference of the International Computer Archive for Modern and Medieval English ICAME30 (May 2008, Lancaster, UK) (n) All seven Corpus Linguistics conferences CL2001 - CL2009 (Lancaster x 2, 2001-3, Birmingham x 2, 2005-7, Liverpool, 2009, Birmingham, 2011, and Lancaster, 2013).

Recent Conference committee membership:

1. (t) Workshop on Annotation of corpora for research in the Humanities (January 2012, Heidelberg) (u) Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, LREC2012 (May 2012, Istanbul, Turkey) (v) Corpus Technologies and Applied Linguistics, Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University (XJTLU) (Suzhou, China, June 2012) (w) 9th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science (NLPCS-2012) (June 2012, Wroclaw, Poland)

Proposal and final report reviewing for UK research councils and funding agencies:

1. British Academy, ESRC, AHRC, British Council and The Leverhulme Trust.

Reviewing for international journals:

1. Computer Speech and Language, Language Resources and Evaluation (previously Computers and the Humanities), IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Transactions on Aspect-oriented software development, IET Software, Interacting with Computers.