John Mcnaught

Biography

I am a lecturer in the School of Computer Science, and am a member of the School''s Text Mining Research Group.

I have been working in the general area of natural language processing since 1979, which I came to through previous studies in language and linguistics. Until 2000, I was with the Department of Language Engineering (and its Centre for Computational Linguistics) at UMIST, when I transferred to UMIST''s Department of Computation. In 2004, UMIST and the Victoria University of Manchester came together to form the University of Manchester, where I now work in the School of Computer Science.

For many years, I worked on machine translation (MT) aspects, specifically on MT software design, on sublanguage-based MT, and on computational dictionaries. Multilingual issues and sublanguage concerns also brought me to develop strong interests in computational terminology and the representation of special knowledge. From the mid-80s on, I became involved in various language engineering standardisation initiatives such as EAGLES and ISLE. These focussed particularly on issues of reusability of language resources such as text corpora and electronic dictionaries, and design for reuse. Recently, the reusability issue has been exercising researchers in the context of semantic web ontologies.

In the latter half of the 90s, I moved into the area of information extraction, working on ontology-driven information extraction, and then more broadly on text mining.

In September 2004, the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) was established. This was the first publicly funded national centre for text mining in the world and reflects thus the depth and breadth of text mining expertise here in the university. It is hosted by the School of Computer Science. I am currently the Deputy Director of NaCTeM, which is located in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology.

Memberships of committees and professional bodies

Memberships

• Linguistics Association of Great Britain