Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

   

Dr Paula Buttery graduated with a BA in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. Continuing at the same institution she obtained an MPhil in Computer Speech and Language Processing before receiving her PhD in Computational Linguistics in 2006. The topic of her thesis was computational models of first language acquisition. Her primary interests remain in the construction and evaluation of (psycho)-computational models of language acquisition, and also in automated corpus analysis (grammatical and lexical acquisition from corpora). She has recently been working on the English Profiling Project in collaboration with Cambridge University Press, University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate and iLexIR. The project aims to provide a set of reference level descriptions for proficiency in English as a second language.

Paula is a collaborator with the Cambridge Computer Laboratory who also host her website . She has worked for Intel, Dragon Systems and Google, obtaining industrial experience as a research engineer on speech recognition and machine translation systems.

Publications include: 'Large-scale analysis of verb subcategorization differences between child directed speech and adult speech' (with Anna Korhonen, 2005) and 'A quantitative evaluation of naturalistic models of language acquisition; the efficiency of the Triggering Learning Algorithm compared to a Categorial Grammar Learner' (COLING, 2004).