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.

Publications

Chantree, Francis , Nuseibeh, Bashar, De Roeck, Anne and Willis, Alistair(2005). Nocuous Ambiguities in Requirements Specifications. Technical Report 2005/03; Department of Computing, The Open University.

Chantree, Francis , Kilgarriff, Adam,De Roeck, Anne and Willis, Alistair(2005). Using a Distributional Thesaurus to Resolve Coordination Ambiguities. Technical Report 2005/02; Department of Computing, The Open University.

Willis, Alistair, (2005). Can Online Learning Materials Improve Student Access to Digital Libraries? Technical Report 2005/10; Department of Computing, The Open University.

Ahlfeldt, Hans, Borin, Lars, Daumke, Philipp, Grabar, Natalia, Hallett, Catalina, Hardcastle, David, Kokkinakis, Dimitrios, Mancini, Clara, Marko, Kornel, Merkel, Magnus, Pietsch, Christian , Power, Richard , Scott, Donia , Silvervarg, Annika, Gronostaj, Maria Toporowska,Williams, Sandra and Willis, Alistair(2006). Literature Review on Patient-Friendly Documentation Systems. Technical Report 2006/04; Department of Computing, The Open University.

Howson, Oliver, Adeliyi, Adeola , Willis, Alistair, Hirst, Tony, Charlton, Patricia, Gooch, Daniel, Rosewell, Jonathan, Richards, Mike, Wermelinger, Michel, Piwek, Paul, Savage, Simon , Lowndes, Charly,Thomas, Elaine and Smith, Andrew(2020). Best Practices in using Technological Infrastructures. The Institute of Coding.

Crilley, Rhys, Gillespie, Marie , Kazakov, Vitaly and Willis, Alistair(2021). ‘Russia isn’t a country of Putins!’: How RT bridged the credibility gap in Russian public diplomacy during the 2018 FIFA World Cup. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 24(1) pp. 136–152.

Crilley, Rhys , Gillespie, Marie , Vidgen, Bertie and Willis, Alistair(2022). Understanding RT’s Audiences: Exposure Not Endorsement for Twitter Followers of Russian State-Sponsored Media. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 27(1) pp. 220–242.

Amidei, Jacopo , Piwek, Paul and Willis, Alistair(2020). Identifying Annotator Bias: A new IRT-based method for bias identification. In: Proceedings of The 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 8-13 Dec 2020, Barcelona, Spain, pp. 4787–4797.

Ruiz-Marcos, Germán , Willis, Alistair and Laney, Robin(2020). Automatically calculating tonal tension. In: The 2020 Joint Conference on AI Music Creativity (Sturm, Bob and Elmsley, Andy eds.), 19-23 Oct 2020, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden [On-line].

Mensio, Martino, Alani, Harith and Willis, Alistair(2020). Towards a Cross-article Narrative Comparison of News. In: Proceedings of the Text2Story’20 Workshop (Campos, Ricardo; Jorge, Alípio; Jatowt, Adam and Bhatia, Sumit eds.), CEUR WS.

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