BA (Hons), MPhil, PhD
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Summary
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I am currently a Lecturer in Human Interaction in the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London. My research field is computational linguistics, specifically the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue and the incremental processes of understanding, clarification and repair — both from a theoretical viewpoint and as applied to practical computational dialogue systems. From 2004 to 2008 I was an Engineering Research Associate at the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. In 2004 I completed my PhD at King's College, London; before that, a master's degree in speech & language processing at the University of Cambridge. Prior to this I worked for several years as an engineer in the field of active noise & vibration control, gaining experience in many areas including signal processing and system simulation & optimisation. |
Personal Details
| Full Name | Matthew Richard John Purver |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 26th May 1970 |
| Marital Status | Married |
| Nationality | British |
| Place of Birth | Ware, UK |
| Contact Details | see here |
Education and Employment History
| December 2009 - present | Lecturer in Human Interaction.
Interaction, Media and Communication Group, Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, UK. In 2011 I am teaching Interaction Design (a final-year BSc and MSc course) and Interactive Systems Design (MSc only). |
| January 2009 - November 2009 | Senior Research Fellow.
Interaction, Media and Communication Group, Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, UK. I worked on the Dynamics of Conversational Dialogue (DynDial) project, investigating issues of incrementality in dialogue processing, from experimental, computational and linguistic standpoints. |
| July 2004 - December 2008 | Engineering Research Associate.
Computational Semantics Lab, CSLI, Stanford University, USA. I worked on various projects including CALO (a DARPA-sponsored interactive meeting assistant project, for which we developed automatic understanding agents for human-human conversation, by combining deep and shallow understanding techniques), and CHAT (a NIST-sponsored project developing a multi-device in-car spoken dialogue system in partnership with VW and Bosch). |
| September 2000 - June 2004 | PhD, Computational Linguistics (awarded September 2004).
Research Assistant (2003-4). Logic, Language and Computation Group, Department of Computer Science, King's College London, UK. My PhD thesis, supervised by Jonathan Ginzburg and carried out as part of the ROSSINI project, concerned the semantics and pragmatics of clarification with particular regard to computational dialogue systems. As part of this project I developed a HPSG/TrindiKit-based dialogue system which handles many forms of clarification questions (including various forms of ellipsis), can interpret and answer user clarifications, and can initiate its own clarificational dialogue to adapt to unknown words and references. From October 2003 I also worked on an ESRC project with Ruth Kempson, investigating the use of Dynamic Syntax in dialogue modelling and its implementation within a dialogue system. |
| October 1999 - August 2000 | MPhil, Computer Speech and Language Processing.
University of Cambridge, UK. My dissertation "Simplistic Question Answering", supervised by Karen Spärck Jones, examined the use of sentence structure in an open-domain question-answering system. |
| April 1995 - August 1999 | Aircraft Systems Manager.
Ultra Electronics Ltd., Noise and Vibration Systems. Ultra NVS is the world leader in aircraft active noise & vibration control systems. As Aircraft Systems Manager, in charge of the System Design Group, my principal responsibilities were: - design and optimisation of control system configurations - development and specification of control algorithms and control system philosophy - investigation of new applications for existing and developing technology - planning and leading of experimental trials and production system tests |
| August 1992 - March 1995 | Scientist.
Noise Cancellation Technologies (UK) Ltd. NCT (UK) was a small research and development company based in Cambridge. NCT developed the active control technology that has been since used successfully by Ultra NVS. |
| October 1989 - June 1992 | BA (Hons), Engineering. Part II - 2:1; Part IB - 1; Part IA - 1.
University of Cambridge, UK. Awarded Scholarship 1990, 1991 |
Publications
See here.
Reviewing/Programme Committees
| 2011 |
ACL |
| 2010 |
SEMDIAL (Programme Co-Chair)
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| 2009 |
SIGDIAL (Local Chair)
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| 2008 |
ICASSP
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| 2007 |
ICASSP
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| 2006 |
Intelligent User Interfaces (workshop on Effective Multimodal Dialogue Interfaces)
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| 2005 |
Dialogue Modelling & Generation symposium
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| 2004 |
SIGDIAL |
| 2003 |
EACL Student Session |
| 2002 |
ACL Student Session |
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