Last week, the RGCL and SCRG PhD Students presented their research to their peers and staff members from across the University. The posters were well received.

Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group

David Foster: ‘Determining YouTube Video Popularity: Analysing YouTube User Behaviours’

Kuk Aduku: ‘ Do Patents Cite Conference Papers as Often as Journal Articles in Engineering? An Investigation of Four Fields’

Research Group in Computational Linguistics

Mohammad Alharbu: ‘Readability Assessment for Arabic as a Second Language’

Najah Albaqawi: ‘Gender Variation in Gulf Pidgin Arabic’

This poster is an attempt to provide a quantitative variationist analysis on variability in GPA morpho-syntax (Arabic definiteness markers, Arabic conjunction markers, object or possessive pronoun, GPA copula, and  agreement in the verb phrase and the noun phrase) which aims to discover the potential effect of the three factors: male and female gender, speakers’ first language, and number of years spent in the Gulf.

Richard Evans: ‘Sentence Rewriting for Language Processing’

This poster provided an overview of the OB1 sentence simplification system. In this approach, the functions of various textual markers of syntactic complexity (conjunctions, relative pronouns, and punctuation marks) are identified and used to inform an iterative rule-based sentence transformation process.

Ahmed Omer: ‘New Techniques For Finding Authorship in Arabic Texts’

The degree of stylistic difference between a pair of documents can then be found by any of a number of measures which compare the sets of linguistic features for each document. In general, The technique is used to first find a set of linguistic features and a difference measure which successfully discriminates between texts known to be either by author A or author B. Then texts of unknown authorship are compared against these texts to see whether their writing style is more similar to author A or author B.

Omid Rohanian: ‘ NLP Approaches to estimating Text Difficulty’

I am exploring NLP approaches in investigating text difficulty at the level of concepts.

Shiva Taslimpoor: ‘Automatic Extraction and Translation of Multiword Expressions’

We employ the state-of-the-art word embedding approaches to automatically identify and translate idiosyncratic Multiword Expressions.