The Research Group in Computational Linguistics was founded in 1998 as part of the School of Law, Social Sciences and Communications and since 2005 it has been a member of the Research Institute of Information and Language Processing. The group is led by Prof. Ruslan Mitkov and is pursuing active research in a wide variety of topics in computational linguistics. The group has established an international reputation which can be seen through our projects and papers.

The results from the Research Assessment Exercise announced on 17 December 2008 confirm the Research Group in Computational Linguistics as one of the top performers in UK research. The research output of the group has been rated as internationally leading, internationally excellent and internationally recognised.

Computational Linguistics was entered in Unit of Assessment "Linguistics" and Wolverhampton was ranked joint 3rd with 2 more universities. According to the league tables of the Guardian, The Times and Research Fortnight, research in Linguistics at the University of Wolverhampton is one of the top 6 best in the UK.

• 2012-04-20Sujay Kumar Jauhar, a Master's student at the Research Group of Computational Linguistics at the University of Wolverhampton, has built a system that participated and ranked first in the SemEval-2012 shared task on Lexical Simplification. The system called SimpLex, which was developed jointly with Dr. Lucia Specia, ranked as the best system among nine participants by a statistically significant margin, also outperforming a very strong baseline.

  The system uses a linear weighted ranking function composed of three features to produce a ranking. These include a context sensitive n-gram frequency model, a bag-of-words model and a feature composed of simplicity oriented psycholinguistic features. These three features are combined using an SVM ranker that is trained and tuned on the Trial dataset. Further details of the shared task can be found at: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/semeval-2012/task1/

  
• 2012-01-31
  Congratulations to Naveed Afzal, who was awarded today a PhD with a thesis on "Unsupervised Relation Extraction for E-Learning Applications"
  
• 2012-01-01A new €500,000 project will help medical staff to learn a European language and improve communication with patients.

  Academics from the University of Wolverhampton have joined forces with partners from the NHS West Midlands Workforce Deanery and universities and healthcare services in Spain and Germany for the TELL-ME project.

  The initiative will provide self-study material for English, Spanish and German which uses vocabulary specifically aimed at medics.

  The two-year project was developed in response to a European Union priority to increase people’s mobility around Europe, and the European Parliament is also discussing ways to enhance cross-border healthcare. With all the benefits of this mobility, it is important to maintain high quality medical treatment and ensure a high standard of doctor-patient communication.

  Professor Ruslan Mitkov, Director of the Research Institute of Information and Language Processing (RIILP) at the University of Wolverhampton, said: “A breakdown in patient-medic communication can lead to aggravated health problems and increased healthcare costs, so it is critically important to minimise language barriers wherever possible.

  “By focusing on three of the most spoken languages in Europe our project will help not only English, German and Spanish native speakers working in their home countries, but also medical professionals from countries such as Poland, Sweden or Bulgaria who wish to work in another EU country. In addition, it can have an influence outside the EU as citizens improving their English or Spanish skills could work in North and South America and Oceania, and non-EU patients visiting the EU are likely to be able to use one of these languages.”

  Funding for the project has come from the Leonardo da Vinci Multilateral Projects for Development of Innovation, which is part of the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning Programme.

  The University of Wolverhampto

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