Dr Phillip Smith PhD

Dr Phillip Smith

School of Computer Science
Associate Professor

Contact details

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

Phillip Smith is an associate professor and the Head of Student Development and Support in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham.

Phillip is interested in natural language processing, in particular, sentiment analysis. Phillip is investigating how discourse function affects supervised machine learning classifiers trained to tackle this problem.

Please follow the link below to find out more about Phillip's work:

Dr Phillip Smith - personal webpage

Qualifications

  • PhD, Computer Science 2017

  • AFHEA, 2016

  • BSc Computer Science (1st Class) 2009

Biography

Phil Smith qualified with a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Birmingham. He went on to work as a software engineer before returning to Birmingham for a PhD investigating the development of machine learning algorithms for sentiment analysis in the clinical domain. He was awarded his PhD in 2017 and is now a lecturer in the department.

Teaching

2018-19 (Birmingham)

  • Professional Computing (Level 2/I, UG, Autumn)

  • Artificial Intelligence (Level 1/C, UG, Spring)

  • MSc Operating Systems and Networks (Level 4/M C, PG, Spring)

2017-2018 (Birmingham)

  • Professional Computing (Level 2/I, UG, Autumn)

  • Robot Programming (Level 1/C, UG, Spring)

  • MSc Operating Systems and Networks (Level 4/M C, PG, Spring)

2016-2017 (Birmingham)

  • MSc Operating Systems and Networks (Level 4/M C, PG, Spring)

  • Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing (Extended) (Level 4/M, PG, Spring)

Other activities

I am a careers tutor and an A2B lead tutor for the School of Computer Science. I have also carried out consultancy work for Birmingham City Council on the issue of public health.

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

Devine, RT, Kovatchev, V, Grumley Traynor, I, Smith, P & Lee, M 2023, 'Machine learning and deep learning systems for automated measurement of ‘advanced’ theory of mind: reliability and validity in children and adolescents', Psychological Assessment, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 165-177. https://doi.org/10.1037/pas0001186

Alharbi, AI, Smith, P & Lee, M 2022, 'Integrating character-level and word-level representation for affect in Arabic tweets', Data and Knowledge Engineering, vol. 138, 101973. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2021.101973

Chapter (peer-reviewed)

Kovatchev, V, Smith, P, Lee, M, Grumley Traynor, I, Luque Aguilera, I & Devine, RT 2020, “What is on your mind?” Automated Scoring of Mindreading in Childhood and Early Adolescence. in D Scott, N Bel & C Zong (eds), Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, International Committee on Computational Linguistics, Barcelona, Spain, pp. 6217, International Conference on Computational Linguistics , Barcelona, Spain, 8/12/20. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.547

Conference article

Potts, K, Smith, P & Bahja, M 2024, 'Exploring the Potential of Virtual Reality Sensory Rooms', CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 3712, 4. <https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3712/paper4.pdf>

Alharbi, AI, Smith, P & Lee, M 2021, 'Enhancing contextualised language models with static character and word embeddings for emotional intensity and sentiment strength detection in Arabic tweets', Procedia CIRP, vol. 189, pp. 258-265. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2021.05.089

Conference contribution

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.

Potts, K, Smith, P & Bahja, M 2025, Virtual Reality Sensory Rooms: A Tool to Reduce Anxiety in Autistic Adults. in TZ Ahram & R Motschnig (eds), Human Interaction and Emerging Technologies (IHIET 2025): Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Human Interaction & Emerging Technologies (IHET 2025) August 25-27, 2025, University of Vienna, Austria. vol. 197, Open Access Science in Human Factors Engineering and Human Centred Computing, vol. 197, Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE) International, 15th International Conference on Human Interaction and Emerging Technologies, Vienna, Austria, 25/08/25.

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

Alnafesah, G, Smith, P & Lee, M 2023, Are you not moved? Incorporating Sensorimotor Knowledge to Improve Metaphor Detection. in R Mitkov & G Angelova (eds), Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing. International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, Incoma Ltd, pp. 80-89, 2023 International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing: Large Language Models for Natural Language Processing, RANLP 2023, Varna, Bulgaria, 4/09/23. https://doi.org/10.26615/978-954-452-092-2_009

Al Amer, S, Lee, M & Smith, P 2023, Cross-lingual Classification of Crisis-related Tweets Using Machine Translation. in R Mitkov & G Angelova (eds), Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing. International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, Incoma Ltd, pp. 22-31, 2023 International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing: Large Language Models for Natural Language Processing, RANLP 2023, Varna, Bulgaria, 4/09/23. https://doi.org/10.26615/978-954-452-092-2_003

Gokhan, T, Smith, P & Lee, M 2023, Node-Weighted Centrality Ranking for Unsupervised Long Document Summarization. in E Métais, F Meziane, V Sugumaran, W Manning & S Reiff-Marganiec (eds), Natural Language Processing and Information Systems: 28th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2023, Derby, UK, June 21–23, 2023, Proceedings. 1 edn, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 13913, Springer, Cham, pp. 299–312, 28th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, Derby, United Kingdom, 21/06/23. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35320-8_21

Kovatchev, V, Smith, P, Lee, M & Devine, R 2021, Can vectors read minds better than experts? Comparing data augmentation strategies for the automated scoring of children's mindreading ability. in C Zong, F Xia, W Li & R Navigli (eds), Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). vol. 1, International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP), Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL, pp. 1196-1206, Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, ACL-IJCNLP 2021, Virtual, Online, 1/08/21. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.96

Gokhan, T, Smith, P & Lee, M 2021, Extractive financial narrative summarisation using SentenceBERT-based clustering. in Proceedings of the 3rd Financial Narrative Processing Workshop FNP 2021., 18, Workshop on Financial Narrative Processing (FNP), Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL, pp. 94-98, 3rd Financial Narrative Processing Workshop, FNP 2021, Lancaster, United Kingdom, 15/09/21. <https://aclanthology.org/2021.fnp-1.18.pdf>

Preprint

Kovatchev, V, Smith, P, Lee, M & Devine, R 2021 'Can vectors read minds better than experts? Comparing data augmentation strategies for the automated scoring of children's mindreading ability' arXiv, pp. 1-11. <https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01635v1>

View all publications in research portal