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Dr Andrew Caines is a Senior Research Associate in the Natural Language and Information Processing Research (NLIP) Group at the Computer Laboratory, and has been a member of the Automated Language Teaching & Assessment Institute (ALTA) since its foundation in October 2013. Prior to that he was a data analyst in the Literature Services team at the E…

Mandy Wigdorowitz is a PhD candidate in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. She is researching the psycholinguistic and cognitive effects of language experience in multilinguals with a focus on language and interaction from linguistic, social, cognitive and psychological perspectives. In addition to her doctoral research, she is a registered Resea…

Jonathan R. Goodman is a doctoral student at the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies researching human social evolution, mimicry, and the evolution of exploitative behaviours. He is particularly interested in understanding why communication is so complex across species, and how some aspects of communication are exploited, through mimic…

Congratulations to Prof. Anna Korhonen and her team at the Cambridge Language Technology Laboratory (LTL) on being awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Proof of Concept grant of €150,000 for their project, 'Enabling Multilingual Conversational AI'.Proof of Concept grants are part of the EU's research and innovation programme, Horizon 2020, and…

In response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and Government advice, all University staff except those needed for business-critical activity, are now working remotely. This includes Cambridge Language Sciences staff and many members of our research community.We realise that during this time of remote working, for many of us it is more importan…

Congratulations to Cambridge Language Sciences network member Dr Kirsty McDougall and her team on securing Economic and Social Research Council funding worth £880,000 for their new project on ‘Improving Voice Identification Procedures’ (IVIP).IVIP is an exciting 3-year interdisciplinary project on earwitness evidence and voice parades – the identif…

The Cambridge Language Sciences Annual Symposium is an annual meeting of minds, giving members of the Cambridge Language Sciences research community the opportunity to meet for an afternoon of talks, poster presentations and informal networking.          This year’s Annual Symposium on Language Change took place on 19 November at Cripp’s Court, Mag…

For five weeks over the summer of 2019, a group of Cambridgeshire teenagers took part in an experimental programme aimed at developing communication skills, building confidence and fostering a sense of belonging.The project took its name from an ‘untranslatable’ Welsh word Hiraeth which conveys a deep longing for a home which you can never return t…

Congratulations to Cambridge Language Sciences network members, Simon Baker and Gamal Crichton on winning first prize in the 2019 Cambridge Enterprise Postdoc Business Plan Competition for their early-stage startup, Versed AI.Versed AI, which uses state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automatically map supply chains, has won £20,000…

A Cambridge-led team seeks to revitalise languages in the UK with a series of interactive pop-up exhibitions designed to set tongues wagging.An Alice in ‘Language Wonderland’ adventure; a ‘Lost in Translation’ untranslatable word challenge; a pool of creatures carrying words loaned to English like emoji, rucksack and graffiti; a ‘language family’ s…

Scientists have come a step closer to understanding how we’re able to understand spoken language so rapidly, and it involves a huge and complex set of computations in the brain.The way our brain enables us to understand what someone is saying, as they’re saying it, is remarkable. By looking at the real-time flow of information in the brain we’ve sh…

Thanks to funding from the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account, a chance meeting with nutrition education charity NNEdPro in Cambridge has enabled Professor Ianthi Tsimpli to take her research out of the classroom and into the teaching kitchens of Kolkata’s slums. It’s food for thought.At first glance, a nutrition education charity’s work appears to h…

Katie Howard, University of Cambridge; Jenny Gibson, University of Cambridge, and Napoleon Katsos, University of CambridgeBilingual or multilingual families have difficult choices to make if their child is diagnosed with autism. While it is certainly possible to be bilingual if you are autistic, many parents are advised that one language may be eas…

Researchers in Cambridge’s Faculty of Education are working with teachers to improve the experience of learning in the East of England – and boost pupils’ life chances.The projects work because schools in our region, which is very diverse, want to work with us. This is not just pie in the sky, ivory tower stuff: it is practical, and real, and of us…

Searching through the mountains of published cancer research could be made easier for scientists, thanks to a new AI system. As a cancer researcher, even if you knew what you were looking for, there are literally thousands of papers appearing every dayAnna KorhonenThe system, called LION LBD and developed by computer scientists and cancer researche…