Nigel Collier's research is in the broad area of Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics. His research brings together computational techniques such as machine learning, syntactic parsing and concept understanding with the aim of providing a machine-understandable semantic representation of text. This is used to support real-world tasks, e.g. question answering and knowledge discovery from very large scale data sources such as the World Wide Web. His current EPSRC project looks at harnessing the social media as a signal source to try and detect pandemic influenza.

Nigel works in collaboration with colleagues from computer science, the life sciences and linguistics.

His research interests include:

• Computational linguistics
• Machine learning
• Semantics
• Text/data mining
• Knowledge discovery
• Domain adaptation
• Question answering