Academic biography

I am an experienced research leader in the field of Natural Language Processing and AI. I am a PI on a Science Foundation Ireland Frontiers for the Future project, and a named supervisor in the SFI-funded CRT, ml-labs. Previously, I was a PI on Enterprise Ireland and Irish Research Council projects and a Funded Investigator in the SFI-funded CNGL and its successor centre, ADAPT. I have supervised eleven PhD students to completion, and am currently supervising four PhD students. I have authored 100+ peer-reviewed publications on Natural Language Processing topics including language parsing and generation, interpretability, sentiment analysis, question answering, grammar checking, language models and Irish language technology. I am a regular programme committee member for the main conferences in my field, and from 2016 to 2019, I served on the executive board of the Association for Computational Linguistics. I teach Natural Language Processing to students on the B.Sc. in Data Science and M.Sc in Computing (NLP) programmes, and introductory python programming to students on the B.Sc. in Computing for Business. I am the Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning in the Faculty of Engineering and Computing.