| Associate Professor & Deputy Head
Dept of Computer Science and Software Engineering University of Melbourne Victoria 3010, Australia http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~sb/ |
Senior Research Associate
Linguistic Data Consortium University of Pennsylvania 3600 Market Street, Suite 810 Philadelphia, PA 19104-2653, USA http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sb/ |
Office: L6.07, 111 Barry St, Carlton; Phone: +61 3 8344 1361; LinkedIn; facebook; public key
I am investigating computational models for linguistic structures and processes, with application to language technologies and to the documentation of endangered languages. My current focus is on efficient query for databases of hierarchically annotated data. After completing a PhD on computational phonology at the University of Edinburgh in 1990, I worked on a series of European research projects and conducted linguistic fieldwork in Cameroon with SIL. In 1998 I moved to the University of Pennsylvania, becoming Associate Director of the LDC, and working on models and tools for linguistic annotation. In 2002 I returned home to Australia and established the Melbourne University Language Technology Group. In 2007 I was awarded the Kelvin Medal for excellence in teaching. In 2008 I am vice president of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Key Activities: Coordinating first year Informatics; developing the Natural Language Toolkit; writing a textbook on NLP; leading the Language Technology Group.
Key Publications: Natural Language Processing in Python; Designing and evaluating an XPath dialect for linguistic queries (ICDE). Seven dimensions of portability for language documentation and description (Language); A formal framework for linguistic annotation (Speech Communication); Computational phonology: A constraint-based approach (Cambridge);