Qualifications
I have an MA in Computational Linguistics from the University of Trier (Germany) and a PhD in English from the University of Birmingham.
My MA dissertation (1996) was on the topic of designing and developing a computer system for accessing corpus data; my PhD thesis (2006) was about automatically extracting linguistic information from text corpora. This thesis is available on the eTheses repository.
Biography
I came to the University of Birmingham in 1994, originally working as a research associate on the EU-funded MECOLB project. Until 2000, I contributed to a number of other EU projects, was computer officer in the English department, and also worked for the Cobuild Project for a while.
In 2000 I was appointed lecturer, and have taught a variety of modules on English language since then.
I completed my PhD on the automatic extraction of linguistic information from text corpora in 2006. In 2010/11 I became the first humanities researcher at the University to be awarded a Medici fellowship to support developing my current research on text analysis towards a commercial product.
Teaching
I am currently convening the undergraduate module 'Text and Discourse'. This academic year I am not teaching any seminars, as I have been awarded a Medici Fellowship to help me work on developing my research towards commercial application.
Postgraduate supervision
I am happy to supervise PhD students in most areas of natural language processing and corpus linguistics.
Current PhD students:
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Garry Plappert on academic language (with Susan Hunston)
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Judith Roads on the language of early Quaker tracts (with Hugh Adlington)
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Sheng Li on the influence of twitter on the stock market
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Will Lingle on Critical Discourse Analysis (with Nick Groom)
Previous PhD students:
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Gena Bennett, Teaching Grammar for EAP Writing in the IEP
Research
My main research interests are in computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). Among other things I am currently working on sentiment analysis, corpus-based phraseology, automatic processing of pattern grammar, and the use of parallel computing for text and corpus analysis.
Other activities
I am Head of Postgraduate Studies (DR); for more details on text processing software and publications see my personal website at http://olivermason.info
Publications