While at Lancaster I have organised nine conferences: two for the British Computer Society (Information Retrieval Specialist Group conference, 1993 and 1994), two as part of a departmental initiative to establish a forum to discuss the use of corpora in teaching (Teaching and Language Corpora 1994 and 1996) and specialist conferences on discourse anaphora (Discourse Anaphora and Reference Resolution Conferences, 1996, 1998 and 2000). I have recently initiated a conference series entitled ‘Corpus Linguistics’. Two conferences have so far been held – in 2001 and 2003. The series is popular and successful and will continue (the next conference is at Birmingham University in 2005).
All of these conferences have attracted a wide international audience, with, for example, the 2000 Discourse Anaphora conference attracting participants from India, Japan and North America as well as a number of European countries. In addition to organising these conferences, I have been on the organising committee of important conferences in my area including the Anaphora and Parsing workshops of the European ACL and Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing.
Of these conferences, the Teaching and Language Corpora conferences have established themselves as particularly important (the fourth was held at Graz this year with around 100 participants). The Discourse Anaphora conferences were instrumental in helping me to achieve one of my research goals (a corpus-based approach to the study of discourse anaphora).
Finally, I am organizing Digital Resources and the Humanities at Lancaster in 2005.
Internationally, I
have examined Ph.D. theses for the University of Calcutta (1), the University
of Nijmegen (1), the Université de Paris VI (2) and the University of Santiago
de Compostella (1). Additionally I was a member of an expert panel reviewing
student progress in postgraduate linguistics studies in Norway in 1997.
Nationally, I have
acted as external examiner on a series of research Master’s theses for the
Language Engineering Department at UMIST (8) and I have examined Ph.D. theses
for Brighton University (1), Lancaster University (3), Leeds University (1),
Liverpool University (2), Sheffield University (4), Stirling (2) and UMIST (1).
I was external examiner on the M.Sc. in CALL and TESOL at the Centre for
English Language Teaching, University of Stirling from 1997-2000. I was
external examiner on the B.Sc. in Computational Linguistics at UMIST (2000 -
2004). I am currently external examiner of the BA in English, Liverpool
University (2004 - ) and am external on the MA in Digital Culture and
Technology at Kings College London starting (2004 - ).
I founded, and am co-editor of, the Edinburgh University Press series Empirical Linguistics (1995 - ) with A. Wilson. The series is particularly important, as it has rapidly established itself as amongst the most important book series in the area of corpus linguistics. I am also founding co-editor, with Paul Rayson, of the Routledge Frequency Dictionaries series (2000 - ). Additionally, I co-edit the Routledge series Advances in Corpus Linguistics (2000 - ) with Michael Hoey.
I am a member of the editorial board of the series Current Research in the Semantic/Pragmatics Interface published by John Benjamins (1998 - ) and Lodz Studies in Language (1998 - ) published by Peter Lang. I am also co-editor of the UCREL technical papers series. I was the general editor of the journal of Applied Computer Translation (1990 – 1992).
I am regularly asked to referee submissions both to conferences and journals in my area. The following is a sample of the conferences and journals I have reviewed for:
Conferences: COLING, EACL, LREC, Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing,
SIG-IR.
Journals: Computing and the Humanities, Journal of French Language Studies,
Literary and Linguistic Computing, Machine Translation
I was Secretary of the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group (1991 – 1993). I was invited by the Arts and Humanities Data Service to be Lancaster's representative on the board of the University of Oxford’s Text Archive (1997 - 2000). This is a national research support unit which makes available electronic texts for use by scholars. I advised on what their text acquisition policy should be. My association with the AHDS continues, however, as I have recently (2004 - ) been appointed to be a member of the AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics Advisory Committee. The committee advises the AHDS on policy in this area. In turn the AHDS advises the AHRB and JISC.
I am currently a member of the management board of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Europe’s principal language resource dissemination agency (2000 - ). The membership of ELRA is drawn from a wide number of academic and commercial research centres across Europe. I am one of only two academics on the Board, which is mainly composed of industrial researchers, e.g. the Heads of Research from Phillips and Siemens.
I have been asked regularly to review project proposals and end of project reports by the AHRB, British Academy, EPSRC, ESRC and the Leverhulme Trust. I act as an expert in my area for DG XIII at the European Commission. Additionally, the ESRC has employed me to review the work of their Centre for Cognitive Science in Edinburgh. I have also been invited to a variety of CEC and EPSRC planning workshops.
I am one of 4 associate directors of the AHRB’s research methods network. The network is directed by Harold Short, King’s College London.
I believe in the importance of publicising both the University and its research. In the past two years alone my research has been featured in national newspapers such as the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and the Guardian. Local papers, such as the Lancashire Evening Post have also carried articles on my research. I have featured on radio stations such as Asian Sound Radio, BBC Radio 4 and on the BBC World Service. My research on swearing has led to a very large number of media appearances
[1] Figures appearing in parenthesis after each institution in this section indicate the number of times I have undertaken a particular examination task at that institution.