Towards User-intent aware Multimodal Retrieval

Biography

Researcher working on problems within areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) at the Institute for People-Centred AI (PAI) and School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering. As a research lead, I manage Human-Machine Interaction theme @ PAI, and the NLP subgroup within the Nature Inspired Computing and Engineering group (NICE) @ Computer Science Research Centre. I also lead the teaching on the NLP module offered to undergraduate (COM3029) and postgraduate students (COMM061). 

My research focuses on developing scalable and safe human-machine interaction using foundation models. Guided by the principles of Responsible and Inclusive AI, my work emphasises cross-lingual and multimodal learning to address challenges like online toxicity, misinformation, and digital accessibility for low-resource languages. All our research outcomes- code, data, and models, are publicly available on the SurreyNLP GitHub and HuggingFace.

My prior roles include a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre for Translation Studies, a joint PhD from IIT Bombay and Monash University, and Research Engineer at the CFILT Lab.

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Biography

I am Professor of Language and Translation Technologies at the Centre of Translation Studies, University of Surrey, UK, and a Fellow of the Surrey Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence. Before starting this role, I was Reader (Associate Professor) in Computational Linguistics at the University of Wolverhampton, UK, and the deputy head of the Research Group in Computational Linguistics at the same university. I hold a PhD in computational linguistics and a BSc in computer science.

With over 25 years of experience in the fields of Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and Linguistics, I have established myself as a leading researcher in the development of technologies that facilitate access to information. My PhD was in automatic summarisation, and I have led projects on question answering, text simplification, and translation technologies. Notable projects that I have led are EmpASR, an AHRC-funded project focused on training interpreters on how to benefit from the latest developments in artificial intelligence; HarnessingNLP4Court, a UKRI-funded project focused on facilitating access to legal information; the EXPERT project, an Initial Training Network (ITN) funded under the EU’s FP7 to train the next generation of world-class researchers in the field of data-driven translation technology; and the FIRST project, which developed language technologies for making texts more accessible to people with autism.

My current research is interdisciplinary, focusing on the intersection of AI, NLP, and translation studies. In recent years, I have increasingly focused on the practical application of NLP to support translators and interpreters. My recent publications explore reference-less translation evaluation, the processing of multilingual content in low-resource settings, the use of automatic speech recognition to support interpreters, and the use of large language models in text accessibility. My research is well known as a result of over 150 peer-reviewed articles in journals, books, and international conferences.

I am currently leading an EPSRC-funded project focused on making science accessible, and I am Co-Director of the ADA Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Network.  More information about my work can be found at https://dinel.org.uk/.

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