Outline CV:
Dr Eric Atwell, Senior Lecturer, Language research group leader,
Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Biological Systems, School of Computing, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT
TEL: +44-113-3435430 MOBILE: +44-7922-088107 FAX: +44-113-3435468
e.s.atwell@leeds.ac.uk
http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/eric http://www.linkedin.com/in/ericatwell
National Insurance no: WK 57 80 75 C ; born 5th January 1960, London, UK; British citizen; married, 4 children
Qualifications:
B.A. First Class Honours: Computing and Linguistics, Lancaster University, 1981.
PhD in Computing: Corpus Linguistics and Language Learning, Leeds University, 2008.
Previous career:
1996-present: Senior Lecturer, School of Computing, University of Leeds
2000: visiting researcher, Dept of Computer Science, University of Sheffield UK
1994-1996: National Coordinator, JISC Language and Speech New Technologies Initiative
1995: visiting scholar, Dept of Computer Applications, Dublin City University IE
1994: visiting scholar, Institute for Language Technology & Artificial Intelligence, Tilburg University NL
1991-1994: National Coordinator, JISC Knowledge Based Systems Initiative
1990-1991: Science and Engineering Research Council, Advanced Research Fellowship
1989: visiting scholar, Max Planck Institute and Dept of Language and Speech, Nijmegen University NL
1984-1990: Lecturer, Department of Computer Studies, Leeds University
1981-1984: Research Fellow, Departments of Linguistics and Computing, Lancaster University
Research interests: Corpus linguistics, English, Arabic language processing, Part-of-Speech tagging,
Knowledge Management, Web search technologies, Artificial Intelligence
Achievements
I have run a range of research projects, funded by EU, EPSRC, HEFC, MoD, SERC, BriSMES, Industry etc.
I have supervised 20 PhD students, and been PhD External Examiner at Universities of Aberystwyth, Bangor,
Birkbeck London, Birmingham, Cardiff, De Montford Leicester, Durham, Essex, Hertfordshire, Imperial
College London, Lancaster, Liverpool John Moores, Manchester, Nottingham Trent, Salford, Sheffield, and
University College London
I have (co-)authored over 160 publications in research journals and conference proceedings
Consultancy work includes a survey of NLP technology for the British Council, published as a book, "The
Language Machine"
I have taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses on a wide range of Computing topics, including
Technologies for Knowledge Management, Natural Language Processing, Computational Modelling,
Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Based Systems, Java programming, Professional Development, …
Some related publications:
Atwell, Eric; Al-Sulaiti, Latifa; Sharoff, Serge. Arabic and Arab English in the Arab World. Proc. International
Conference on Corpus Linguistics, Liverpool, UK. 2009
Sawalha, Majdi; Atwell, Eric. Comparative evaluation of Arabic language morphological analysers and
stemmers. Proc COLING 2008 International Conference on Computational Linguistics. 2008.
Atwell, Eric. Development of tag sets for part-of-speech tagging in: A. Ludeling, M. Kyto (eds) Corpus
Linguistics: An International Handbook, vol. 1, pp. 501-526. Mouton de Gruyter. 2008.
Atwell, Eric; Abbas, Noorhan; Abu Shawar, Bayan; Alsaif, Amal; Al-Sulaiti, Latifa; Roberts, Andrew; Sawalha,
Majdi. Mapping Middle Eastern and North African diasporas: Arabic corpus linguistics research at the
University of Leeds in: Proc BRISMES: British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. 2008.
Brierley, Claire; Atwell, Eric. Prosodic phrase break prediction: problems in the evaluation of models against a
gold standard. Traitement Automatique des Langues Journal, vol. 48.1. 2008.
Atwell, Eric; et al. Which English dominates the World Wide Web, British or American? Proc. International
Conference on Corpus Linguistics, Birmingham, UK. 2007.
Abu Shawar, Bayan; Atwell, Eric. Chatbots: Sind Sie wirklich nu"tzlich? (are they really useful?). LDV-Forum
Journal for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology, vol. 22, pp. 31-50. 2007.
Brierley, Claire; Atwell, Eric. An approach for detecting prosodic phrase boundaries in spoken English. ACM
Crossroads journal, vol. 14.1. 2007.
Al-Sulaiti, Latifa; Atwell, Eric. The design of a corpus of contemporary Arabic. International Journal of
Corpus Linguistics, 11(3), pp.135-171. 2006.
Roberts, Andrew; Al-Sulaiti, Latifa; Atwell, Eric. aConCorde: Towards an open-source, extendable
concordancer for Arabic. Corpora Journal, vol. 1, pp. 39-57. 2006.
Abu Shawar, Bayan; Atwell, Eric. A chatbot system as a tool to animate a corpus. ICAME Journal, vol. 29, pp.
5-24. 2005.
Abu Shawar, Bayan; Atwell, Eric. Using corpora in machine-learning chatbot systems. International Journal
of Corpus Linguistics, 10, pp. 489-516. 2005.
Atwell, Eric; Al-Sulaiti, Latifa; Al-Osaimi, Saleh; Abu Shawar, Bayan. A review of Arabic corpus analysis tools
in: B. Bel, I. Marlien (eds) Proceedings of TALN04: XI Conference sur le Traitement Automatique des
Langues Naturelles, vol. 2, pp. 229-234, ATALA. 2004
Atwell, Eric; Howarth, Peter; Souter, Clive. The ISLE corpus: Italian and German spoken learner's English.
ICAME Journal, vol. 27, pp. 5-18. 2003.
Abu Shawar, Bayan; Atwell, Eric. Using the corpus of Spoken Afrikaans to generate an Afrikaans chatbot.
Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies journal, vol. 21, pp. 283-294. 2003.
Abu Shawar, Bayan; Atwell, Eric. Machine learning from dialogue corpora to generate chatbots. Expert
Update journal, vol. 6, pp. 25-30. 2003.
Atwell, E; Howarth, P; Souter, C; Baldo, P; Bisiani, R; Bonaventura, P; Herron, D; Menzel, W; Morton, R; Wick,
H. User-guided system development in ISLE: Interactive Spoken Language Education. Natural Language
Engineering journal, vol. 6, pp. 229-241. 2000.
Atwell, E; Demetriou, G; Hughes, J; Schriffin, A; Souter, C; Wilcock, S. A comparative evaluation of modern
English corpus grammatical annotation schemes. ICAME Journal, vol. 24, pp. 7-23. 2000.
Elliott, John; Atwell, Eric. Is anybody out there?: the detection of intelligent and generic language-like features.
Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 53, pp. 13-22. 2000.
Atwell, E S. What can SALT offer the English teaching professional?. English Teaching Professional
journal, vol. 7, pp. 46-47. 1998.
Churcher, G E; Atwell, E S; Souter, C. Using a commercial speech recogniser within the domain of Air Traffic
Control WEB-SLS: WWW European Journal of Language and Speech 97-03. 1997.
Atwell, E S. The HEFC's Knowledge Based Systems Initiative. Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of
Behaviour Quarterly, vol. 83/84, pp. 29-34. 1993.
Sampson, G; Haigh, R; Atwell, E S. Natural language analysis by stochastic optimisation: a progress report on
Project APRIL in JETAI: Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, Volume 1, pp271287. 1989.
Brockett, Adrian; Atwell, Eric; Taylor, Owen; Page, Matthew. An Arabic text database and glossary system for
students. Proc Seminar on Bilingual Computing in Arabic and English, pp.154-162, University of
Cambridge, UK. 1989.
Atwell, E. Current European research in Computational Linguistics in Artificial Intelligence and Simulation
of Behaviour Quarterly no.62 pp.22-23. 1987.
Atwell, E S. Constituent-Likelihood Grammar in ICAME Journal of the International Computer Archive of
Modern English Vol.7. 1983.
Leech, G; Garside, R; Atwell, E S. The Automatic Grammatical Tagging of the LOB Corpus in ICAME Journal
of the International Computer Archive of Modern English Vol.7. 1983.
Leech, G; Garside, R; Atwell, E S. Recent developments in the use of computer corpora in English language
research, in Transactions of the Philological Society, pp.23-40. 1983.