Dr Alistair Willis

Senior Lecturer in Computing

My research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP), and in particular how people interpret ambiguous text. At the Open University, I have investigated how to build computational models that predict when different people will disagree on the interpretation of ambiguous text. My work has looked at both the theoretical foundations of the phenomenon, and its potential impact in the area of requirements engineering.

I am also interested in the problem of how to recognise semantic similarity between texts. My research in this area applies inductive logic programming to learn systems for automatically grading students' written work. This work is currently being extended to use deep learning models for grading, as well as traditional symbolic methods.

The methods underlying these tasks are generalisable beyond NLP. I have collaborated with computational musicologists on machine learning techniques to support automatic music composition for games, and with social scientists on using social media to understand the audience for the Russian television network RT.

I now lead the Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing research group in the School of Computing and Communications, and leads the Data Science theme of the Institute of Coding.