Sian Gooding - 2019 Cohort

Sian Gooding  shg36@cam.ac.uk

United Kingdom

Faculty of Computer Science & Technology, Jesus College

PhD thesis: Advanced NLP Techniques for Adaptive Text Simplification

Research Interests

1. Natural Language Processing

2. Machine Learning

3. Neural Network Architectures

4. Eye tracking

My PhD focuses on advanced natural language processing techniques for adaptive text simplification. There are multiple factors that can impact a reader’s ability to understand text, such as their first language, educational background and age. Adaptive text simplification aims to automatically adapt the complexity of text to suit different audiences. During my PhD, I will be implementing adaptive text simplification algorithms using both novel neural architectures and machine learning techniques. Additionally, I will be incorporating eye tracking data into these algorithms in order to more effectively simulate human responses to text complexity.

Who or what inspired you to pursue your research interests?

I was very fortunate to be raised by parents who encouraged scientific discovery, they introduced me to a computer at a very early age and I have been experimenting ever since. Many people have inspired me to pursue a PhD, notably I had an excellent experience studying for the MPhil in Advanced Computer Science at Cambridge. I especially enjoyed working on my thesis which was supervised by Dr. Ekaterina Kochmar and led to me pursuing text simplification as a research interest.