About Me
I'm a Research Fellow working on applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning methods within the medical domain. I also continue to collaborate with Macquarie University in the Department of Computing.
Previously, I completed my PhD at Macquarie University's Centre for Language Technology under the supervision of Associate Prof Mark Dras and Prof Mark Johnson.
My PhD research focused primarily on Native Language Identification (NLI), the task of identifying an author's native language (L1) using only their writings in a second language (L2). Here I investigated how NLP and Machine Learning can be used to aid linguistic research in Second Language Acquisition and detecting language transfer effects. This is tackled using large-scale learner data to identify common error types or omissions made by non-native speakers and idiosyncratic constructions associated with particular linguistic backgrounds. NLI can also be used for Authorship Profiling and Identification in the context of Forensic Linguistics. It can provide evidence about a writer's linguistic background in situations where a text, like an anonymous letter, is the key piece of evidence in an investigation.
More broadly, my research interests include machine learning, NLP, data mining, information extraction, forensic linguistics, language learning, automated language assessment, language transfer, language identification and computer vision.