Professor Mark Lee BA (Hons), MSc, PhD

Dr Mark Lee

School of Computer Science
Professor of Artificial Intelligence

Contact details

Address
School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Professor Mark Lee is a professor of artificial intelligence in the School of Computer Science. His research interests are focussed on Natural Language Processing. He is specifically interested in Sentiment Analysis of text, the automatic identification and understanding of metaphor and the effects of pragmatic inference in dialogue processing. More recently he has been investigating the extraction of constraints from text to build formal models for reasoning. His research has been funded by the Home Office, RCUK, European Union and various industries.

For more information, please see Mark's personal homepage.

Biography

Mark graduated from Sussex University with a BA (hons) in Computing and Artificial Intelligence and then completed a MSc in System Design at the University of Manchester before completing a PhD in Natural Language Processing at the University of Sheffield. He joined the University of Birmingham as a Research fellow in 1998 and became a lecturer in 2000.

Postgraduate supervision

  • Natural Language Processing

Research

Professor Lee's research interests are focussed on the computational processing of natural language text. He has specific interest in:

  • Sentiment Analysis
  • Semantics/Pragmatics of natural language, especially figurative language
  • Medical Informatics involving Natural Language Processing

NLP like many other areas of AI has been transformed by the application of deep neural models and the use of such models to capture rich semantic information. His current interests are 1) in the theoretical understanding of what kinds of linguistic information can be captured, and 2) developing practical applications using these models, notably in healthcare and psychology.

Publications

Recent publications

Article

Ali, M, Baqir, A, Raza Sherazi, HH, Khalid, S, Smith, P & Lee, M 2024, 'An Extended Pattern Based Comprehensive Stemmer for the Urdu Language', ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, vol. 23, no. 12, 169. https://doi.org/10.1145/3701231

Abbas, A, Lee, M, Shanavas, N & Kovatchev, V 2024, 'Clinical concept annotation with contextual word embedding in active transfer learning environment', Digital Health , vol. 10, pp. 1-31. https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076241308987

Gokhan, T, Price, MJ & Lee, M 2024, 'Graphs in clusters: a hybrid approach to unsupervised extractive long document summarization using language models', Artificial Intelligence Review, vol. 57, no. 7, 189. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-024-10828-w

Chapter (peer-reviewed)

Laureano De Leon, FA, Tayyar Madabushi, H & Lee, M 2024, Code-Mixed Probes Show How Pre-Trained Models Generalise on Code-Switched Text. in N Calzolari, M-Y Kan, V Hoste, A Lenci, S Sakti & N Xue (eds), Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024). International conference on computational linguistics, LREC proceedings, European Language Resources Association (ELRA), pp. 3457–3468, 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation, Torino, Italy, 20/05/24. <https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.307>

Conference contribution

Wang, Y, Dsouza, R, Lee, R, Apperly, I, Devine, RT, van der Kleij, S & Lee, M 2025, Automatic Scoring of an Open-Response Measure of Advanced Mind-Reading Using Large Language Models. in Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2025)). Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL, The Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology, Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States, 3/05/25.

Al Amer, S, Lee, M & Smith, P 2025, Comparative Evaluation of Machine Translation Models Using Human-Translated Social Media Posts as References: Human-Translated Datasets. in Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2025). Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL, The Eighth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages, Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States, 3/05/25.

Yang, L, Zhou, S, Cheng, J, Zhang, F, Wan, J, Wang, S & Lee, M 2025, DAEA: Enhancing Entity Alignment in Real-World Knowledge Graphs Through Multi-Source Domain Adaptation. in O Rambow, L Wanner, M Apidianaki, H Al-Khalifa, B Di Eugenio & S Schockaert (eds), Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics. International conference on computational linguistics, Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL, pp. 5890–5901, The 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 19/01/25. <https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.393/>

Gamboa, LCL & Lee, M 2025, Filipino Benchmarks for Measuring Sexist and Homophobic Bias in Multilingual Language Models from Southeast Asia. in H Hettiarachchi, T Ranasinghe, P Rayson, R Mitkov, M Gaber, D Premasiri, FA Tan & L Uyangodage (eds), Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages. Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL, pp. 123–134, The 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 19/01/25. <https://aclanthology.org/2025.loreslm-1.9/>

Abbas, A, Lee, M, Kovatchev, V & Shanavas, N 2025, MTNER: Multiple Tender Named Entities Recognition and Classification from unstructured tender documents. in Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication. IEEE Press / Wiley, International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication, Bangkok, Thailand, 3/01/25.

Li, W, Li, L, Lee, M & Sun, S 2024, Adaptive Layer Sparsity for Large Language Models via Activation Correlation Assessment. in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37 (NeurIPS 2024). Advances in neural information processing systems, NeurIPS, Thirty-Eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 10/12/24. <https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2024/hash/c573258c38d0a3919d8c1364053c45df-Abstract-Conference.html>

Al Amer, S, Lee, M & Smith, P 2025, Adopting Ensemble Learning for Cross-lingual Classification of Crisis-related Text On Social Media. in AK Ojha, C Liu, E Vylomova, F Pirinen, J Abbott, J Washington, N Oco, V Malykh, V Logacheva & X Zhao (eds), Proceedings of The Seventh Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2024). Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL, pp. 159-165, Seventh Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages , Bangkok, Thailand, 15/08/24. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.loresmt-1.16

Gamboa, LC & Lee, M 2024, A Novel Interpretability Metric for Explaining Bias in Language Models: Applications on Multilingual Models from Southeast Asia. in 38th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation. Proceedings of the Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL, Tokyo, Japan, 38th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, Tokyo, Japan, 7/12/24.

Other contribution

Chen, S, Liang, X, Quinton, M, Veldhuijzen van Zanten, J & Lee, M 2025, Policy briefing: Major Sporting Events for the Community: Engaged by, Participated in, and Benefiting the Community..

Preprint

Leon, FLD, Wang, Y, Feng, Y & Lee, MG 2025 'UoB-NLP at SemEval-2025 Task 11: Leveraging Adapters for Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Emotion Detection' arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2504.08543

Leon, FALD, Madabushi, HT & Lee, M 2024 'Code-Mixed Probes Show How Pre-Trained Models Generalise On Code-Switched Text' arXiv, pp. 1-13. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.04872

View all publications in research portal

Expertise

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Natural Language Processing

Mark has previously provided commentary for the following publications:

  • New Scientist
  • Daily Mail
  • The Metro
  • Daily Express