Dr Nigel Collier

Natural Language Processing; Computational linguistics; Machine learning; Bioinformatics; Semantics; Faculty of English; Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages; School of Arts and Humanities

Dr Nigel Collier is a Research Group Leader at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of English and the Director of Research in Computational Linguistics at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages. He is also a member of the Cambridge Big Data Strategic Research Initiative and of the Cambridge Language Sciences Strategic Research Initiative.

Nigel’s research in the area of Natural Language Processing aims to provide machine-understandable semantic representation of text. His work brings together computational techniques such as machine learning, syntactic parsing and concept understanding.

His research, which can support real-world tasks such as question answering and knowledge discovery from very large scale data sources as as the World Wide Web, can impact the lives of the world’s poorest 3 billion people, e.g. in the area of public health surveillance.

Nigel’s motivation to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals through the participation in Cambridge Global Challenges is mirrored by the leadership, between 2006 and 2012, of the BioCaster research programme for bio-surveillance using multilingual news alerting, an area of research he is still working on. During this time, he served as technical advisor to the Global Health Security Action Group’s working group on Risk Management and Communication.