Since launching the Incubator Fund, over £120,000 has been awarded to the following projects.
Awards in 2024
'Exploring novel figurative language to conceptualise Large Language Models' Prof. Ann Copestake (Computer Science and Technology), Dr Lucy Duggan (writer, translator), Dr Aurelie Herbelot (computational semanticist and entrepreneur), Amira Moeding (History), Dr Eva von Redecker (writer, philosopher)
'Neural encoding of AI-generated speech prosody by L1 and L2 speakers' Dr Julia Schwarz (Psychology), Linda Bakkouche, Stephanie Cooper, Xinbing Luo, Maddy Rees, Brechtje Post (Theoretical and Applied Linguistics), Charles McGhee (Engineering), Dr Kai Alter (Medical Sciences, Newcastle University)
'Generative Speech Corpora for Ecological Speech Perception Assessment'* Dr Lidea Shahidi, Dr Tobias Goehring, Jacqueline Von Seth (MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit), Dr Marina Salorio-Corbetto (Clinical Neurosciences), Dr Calbert Graham, Madeleine Rees (Theoretical and Applied Linguistics)
* with funding from AI@Cam to support research into language equity and inclusion
Awards in 2023
'Developing a Psychologically Grounded Corpus for Measuring Sensationalism in the News' Tiancheng Hu (Theoretical and Applied Linguistics), Prof. Kiran Garimella (School of Communications and Information, Rutgers University), Prof. Nigel Collier (Theoretical and Applied Linguistics)
'Methods for Evaluating Short-cut Learning in Transformer-based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Systems and its implications' Dr Calbert Graham (Theoretical and Applied Linguistics), Dr Luca Scimeca (Harvard University), Nathan Roll (UC Santa Barbara)
- See paper by Graham et al.: Evaluating OpenAI's Whisper ASR: Performance Analysis Across Diverse Accents and Speaker Traits
Awards in 2022
'DEliData Annotation: Understanding Argument Transactions' Dr. Andreas Vlachos (Dept. of Computer Science & Technology), Mr. Georgi Karadzhov (Dept. of Computer Science & Technology), Dr. Tom Stafford (Dept. of Psychology, University of Sheffield)
- See paper by Vlachos et. al.: DeliData: A dataset for deliberation in multi-party problem solving
- Listen to Tom Stafford podcast, How to create better online environments in which arguing and deliberation is more likely to change people’s minds
'Collecting a Corpus of Metaphor Meanings' Prof Simone Teufel (Dept. of Computer Science & Technology), Prof Francis Bond (Dept. of Asian Studies, Palacký University Olomouc), Rowan Hall Maudslay (Dept. of Computer Science & Technology)
'Generalising Native Language Articulation to Non-Native Contexts: A Benchmark and Evaluation Framework' Dr Calbert Graham (Theoretical and Applied Linguistics), Konstantinos Voudouris (Dept. of Psychology & Student Fellow, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence), Dr Yasuaki Shinohara (Faculty of Science & Engineering, Waseda University, Japan).
'Predicting and mitigating contract clause conflict using AI' Felix Steffek (Faculty of Law), Ahmed Izzidien (Psychometric Centre), Rune Nyrup (Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence), Holli Sargeant (Faculty of Law)
- View poster on Cambridge Open Engage: 'What goes on in court? Identifying contract-related topics decided by United Kingdom courts from 1709 to 2021 using machine learning'
'Flexible processing in multilingualism: The case of innovative denominal verbs' Dr Margreet Vogelzang (Theoretical & Applied Linguistics), Prof. Ianthi Tsimpli (Theoretical & Applied Linguistics), Prof Robyn Carston (Division of Psychology & Lang Sciences, UCL)
- View poster on Cambridge Open Engage: 'When we verb a noun: Processing and understanding denominal verbs through pragmatic inferences'
Awards in 2021
'Using tone to predict code-switching in English-Vietnamese/Cantonese/Mandarin' Dr Christopher Bryant (Dept. of Computer Science & Technology), Dr Li Nguyen (Dept. of Computer Science & Technology and Theoretical & Applied Linguistics), Kayeon Yoo (Amazon Alexa Text-to-Speech Group and Theoretical & Applied Linguistics), Katrina Li (Theoretical & Applied Linguistics)
- See paper by Kechun Li et al. Lexical tonal effects in code-switching: A comparative study of Cantonese, Mandarin, and Vietnamese switching with English
- View poster on Cambridge Open Engage: 'Tonal aspects of code-switching: Three case studies of English-Cantonese/Mandarin/Vietnamese'
'Accents as honest signals of in-group membership' Jonathan R Goodman (Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies), Professor Emeritus Robert A Foley (Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies), Professor Emeritus Francis Nolan (Phonetics Lab), Dr Emma Cohen (Social Body Lab, University of Oxford)
- View poster on Cambridge Open Engage: Accents as honest signals of in-group membership
- Read blog of the project on Phonic website: Fake It 'Till You Make It: Accent Mimicry from an Evolutionary Perspective
'A linguistically-driven task on multi-modal spatial reasoning' Fangyu Liu (Language Technology Lab, Theoretical & Applied Linguistics), Dr Guy Emerson (Dept. of Computer Science & Technology), Prof. Nigel Collier (Language Technology Lab, Theoretical & Applied Linguistics)
- See draft paper by Liu et al.: Visual Spatial Reasoning
'Developing an Old English lemmatiser' Dr Marieke Meelen (Theoretical & Applied Linguistics), Dr Andrew Caines (Dept. of Computer Science & Technology & ALTA Institute)
'Live voice vowel inference web app' Dr Bert Vaux (Theoretical & Applied Linguistics), Dr James Burridge (Reader in Probability and Statistical Physics, University of Portsmouth), Dr Michal Gnacik (Senior Lecturer in Mathematics and Physics, University of Portsmouth)
- View the app prototype: Folkspeech
'Empirical evaluation of Graham's hierarchy of disagreement' Dr Andreas Vlachos & Christine de Kock (Dept. of Computer Science & Technology), Dr Tom Stafford (Dept. of Psychology, University of Sheffield)
- Read article related to this project: About Language & AI: an interview with Christine de Kock
'PerMaSC: Speech Perception through Masks in School Contexts' Dr Kirsty McDougall (PI), Julia Schwarz, Katrina Kechun Li, Jasper Hong Sim, Yixin Zhang & Prof. Brechtje Post (Phonetics Laboratory); Dr Lizzie Buchanan-Worster & Dr Lorna Halliday (MRC-CBU); Dr Jenny Gibson (Faculty of Education)
- See paper by Schwarz et al., Semantic Cues Modulate Children’s and Adults’ Processing of Audio-Visual Face Mask Speech, Frontiers in Psychology, July 2022
- See paper by Li et al., Recording and timing vocal responses in online experimentation, Interspeech 2022. doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2022-10697
- Access PerMaSC dataset and scripts at doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/ETVDG
- Read The Conversation article by Julia Schwarz Face masks affect how children understand speech differently from adults – new research
- View project page on Phonetics Lab website: PerMaSC: Speech Perception through Masks in School Contexts
- View poster on Cambridge Open Engage: Speech Perception through Face Masks by Children and Adults
- This project has also led to an undergraduate research project, 'What makes a good listener? Exploring the role of adaptation to language task demands', using the stimuli from PerMaSC (2023)
'DEliData: Deliberation Enhancing Data' Dr Andreas Vlachos (PI) & Georgi Karadzhov (Dept. of Computer Science & Technology), Dr Tom Stafford (Dept. of Psychology, University of Sheffield)
- See paper by Karadzhov et al., What makes you change your mind? An empirical investigation in online group decision-making conversations
- Access DeliData, the first publicly available corpus of small-group problem-solving dialogues, designed to facilitate the development of dialogue systems interacting with humans solving a task.
- Listen to Tom Stafford podcast, How to create better online environments in which arguing and deliberation is more likely to change people’s minds
- Research has also fed into EPSRC-funded project Opening Up Minds: engaging dialogue generated from argument maps
- View poster on Cambridge Open Engage: A Dataset for Multi-party Collaboration
'Listening practice for English learners: towards an intelligent tutoring system' Dr Andrew Caines (PI) & Prof. Paula Buttery (Dept. of Computer Science & Technology), Dr Mirjana Bozic (Dept. of Psychology), Mark Elliott & Dr Hye-won Lee (Cambridge Assessment)
- View poster on Cambridge Open Engage: Listening practice for learners of English: towards an intelligent tutoring system
Awards in 2020
'Crosslinguistic influence in L2 word processing and learning' Dr. Francesca Branzi (MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit), Dr. Ya-Ning Chang (MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit), Dr. Dora Alexopoulou (Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, MMLL)
- View poster on Cambridge Open Engage: The impact of L2 proficiency on cross-language influence during L2 word processing
'The evolution of speech: insight from variation in primate laryngeal anatomy' Professor Marta Lahr & Dr Jacob Dunn (Archaeology), Dr Andrew Gillis (Zoology), Professor Tecumseh Fitch (University of Vienna)
Awards in 2019
'Developing a large scale online study of L1 and L2 speech perception' Dr Brechtje Post (Theoretical & Applied Linguistics), Dr Elaine Schmidt (Cambridge Assessment English), Dr Matt Davis & Dr Becky Gilbert (MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit)
'Named-Entity Recognition in Tibetan and Mongolian Newspapers' Dr Hildegard Diemberger, Dr Thomas White (Mongolian & Inner Asian Studies Unit, Dept. of Social Anthropology), Dr Marieke Meelen (Theoretical & Applied Linguistics). Collaborators: Dr Robert Barnett (Visiting Scholar, Pembroke College), Dr Nathan Hill (SOAS)
- View reports on the status of Natural Language Processing and Named-Entity Recognition for Vertical Mongolian
- View Named-Entity Recognition for Modern Tibetan Newspapers: Tagset, Guidelines and Training Data
- This project has led to a 5-year AHRC-funded research project 'The Emergence of Egophoricity: a diachronic investigation into the marking of the conscious self' (January 2022- January 2026)
- View poster on Cambridge Open Engage: Named Entity Recognition (NER) for Tibetan and Mongolian Newspapers
'Collecting a Dialogue Corpus for Language Learning' Dr Andrew Caines, Dr Helen Yannakoudakis, Dr Paula Buttery (Dept. of Computer Science & Technology); Dr Pascual Pérez-Paredes (Faculty of Education); Prof. Bill Byrne (Dept. of Engineering)
- See paper by Caines et al., The Teacher-Student Chatroom Corpus, NLP4CALL 2020
- View poster on Cambridge Open Engage: Collecting the Teacher-Student Chatroom Corpus
'Talk about mind and space: paternal and maternal contributions to school readiness' Dr Elian Fink (Centre for Play in Education, Development & Learning), Prof. Claire Hughes (Centre for Family Research), Dr Henriëtte Hendriks (Linguistics)
- View poster on Cambridge Open Engage: Talking about space: The role of parent and child sex on the frequency of parental spatial talk, and its association with child numeracy and school readiness
'Cognitive differences between bilingual and monolingual 'struggling learners'' Curtis Sharma (Linguistics), Dr Joni Holmes (Centre for Attention, Memory & Learning, MRC-CBU), Dr Napoleon Katsos (Linguistics), Dr Jenny Gibson (Faculty of Education), Dr Jacalyn Guy (Centre for Attention, Memory & Learning, MRC-CBU)
'The costs of faking it: exploring the role of accent in human social signalling' Prof. Robert Foley (Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies), Jonathon Goodman (Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies), Prof. Ian Roberts (Linguistics), Prof. Francis Nolan (Phonetics Lab, Linguistics)
- View poster on Cambridge Open Engage: Accents as honest signals of in-group membership
- Read blog of the project on Phonic website: Fake It 'Till You Make It: Accent Mimicry from an Evolutionary Perspective
'Automatically standardising two multilingual code-switched corpora' Dr Theresa Biberauer (Computer Science & Technology/Linguistics), Christopher Bryant (Computer Science & Technology), Li Nguyen (Linguistics), Sana Kidwai (Linguistics)
- See paper by Nguyen et al., Autmomatic Language Identification in Code-Switched Hindi-English Social Media Text
'Computational psycholinguistic investigations of semantic graph representations' Dr Andrew Caines (Computer Science & Technology), Dr Mirjana Bozic (Psychology), Giulia Boloventa (Linguistics), Dr Paula Buttery (Computer Science & Technology)
Awards in 2018
'Language, Brains & Machines: an initial literature review' Anna Samuel, Dr Andrew Caines, Dr Paula Buttery (Dept. of Computer Science & Technology)
- See review by Samuel et al., Cambridge Language Sciences Language, Brains & Machines Research Strategy Forum: an initial literature survey, October 2018
'Learning a language at your brain's pace' Dr Henriëtte Hendriks (Linguistics), Prof. Zoe Kourtzi (Psychology), Dr Vicky Leong (Psychology), Dr John Williams (Linguistics)
'Neural encoding of semantic and syntactic information in bilingualism' Dr Mirjana Bozic (Language Brain and Bilingualism Lab, Psychology), Andrea Olguin (Language, Brain and Bilingualism Lab, Psychology), Tristan Bekinschtein (Cambridge Consciousness & Cognition Lab, Psychology)
- See paper by Olguin et al., Bilingualism and language similarity modify the neural mechanisms of selective attention, Nature, June 2019
''Bhavishya Shakti'- Constructs of a novel education intervention in urban slums' Prof. Sumantra Ray (NNEdPro Global Centre for Nutrition and Health), Prof. Ianthi Tsimpli (Linguistics), Dr Minha Rajput-Ray (NNEdPro), Ms Ananya Ria Roy (NNEdPro)
'Multilingualism and subjective wellbeing in the family: a systematic review' Dr Napoleon Katsos (Linguistics), Dr Jenny Gibson (Education)
- See review by Müller et al., Bilingualism in the Family and Child Well-being: a scoping review, International Journal of Bilingualism, Sage, June 2020 / OA pre-print
- Practitioner-oriented article by Müller et al., Bilingualism in the family and children’s well-being: Why speaking the family language is not just a ‘nice to have’, EAL Journal, Issue 15 (Summer 2021), pp 46-50 (NALDIC members only)
- Listen to Elspeth Wilson & Napoleon Katsos talk about this research on the Kletshead podcast: Well-being in bilingual families
- See also We Speak Multi Multilingualism and child well-being webinars for teachers with Lisa-Maria Müller and Napoleon Katsos
'A personalised literacy and numeracy teaching app for mobile devices' Dr Andrew Caines (Linguistics/ALTA); Dr Paula Buttery, Russell Moore, Dr Andrew Rice (Computer Science & Technology); Prof. Ianthi Tsimpli (Linguistics)
- See UROP internship report by Wang et al., Developing a prototype web-app for numeracy assessment and teaching, September 2018
'A collaborative game-based approach to documenting linguistic variation in Brazil' Dr Ioanna Sitaridou (Spanish & Portuguese), Dr Paula Buttery (Computer Science & Technology), Dr Andrew Caines (Linguistics/ALTA)
- See UROP internship report by Zhou et al., A collaborative game-based approach to documenting linguistic variation in Brazil, September 2018
Awards in 2017
'Historical codeswitching and language mutability in the history of English' Dr Laura Wright (English) & Professor Ian Roberts (Linguistics).
'Multisensory semantic integration in inferential comprehension' Dr Ana Pérez, Dr Elaine Schmidt, Dr Luca Cilibarasi, Prof. Ianthi Tsimpli (Linguistics); Dr Andrew Welchman, Prof. Zoe Kourtzi (Psychology)
- See paper by by Pérez et al., Multimodal semantic revision during inferential processing: The role of inhibitory control in text and picture comprehension, Neuropsychologia, Elsevier, February 2020
'Multi-word expressions in spoken learner English' Dr Paula Buttery (Computer Lab) & Dr Andrew Caines (Linguistics)
Awards in 2016
'Neural correlates of selective attention in bilingualism' Dr Mirjana Bozic, Andrea Olguin, Dr Tristan Bekinschtein (Psychology); Dr Napoleon Katsos (Linguistics)
- See paper by Olguin et al., Neural Encoding of Attended Continuous Speech under Different Types of Interference, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, The MIT Press, November 2018
'Crowdsourcing an error-annotated corpus of spoken learner English' Dr Andrew Caines (Linguistics) & Dr Marek Rei (Computer Laboratory)
- See paper by Caines et al., Grammatical error detection in transcrptions of spoken English, COLING 2020
'Towards a parsed corpus of historical Welsh' Dr David Willis (Linguistics), Dr Sheila Watts (German & Dutch), Prof. Paul Russell (Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic)
'The relationship between vision and reading in global and local language processing' Dr Elaine Schmidt, Dr Luca Cilibrasi, Dr Ana Pérez, Prof. Ianthi Tsimpli (Linguistics); Dr Andrew Welchman, Prof. Zoe Kourtzi (Psychology)