Doctor James R. Curran is a computational linguist

Computational linguistics

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....

 and senior lecturer at the University of Sydney

University of Sydney

The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...

.

Research

Curran's research focuses on natural language processing

Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....

 http://en.scientificcommons.org/james_r_curran, making him one of the few Australian computational linguists. Specifically Curran's research has focused on the area of natural language processing

Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....

 known as combinatory categorial grammar

Combinatory categorial grammar

Combinatory categorial grammar is an efficiently parseable, yet linguistically expressive grammar formalism. It has a transparent interface between surface syntax and underlying semantic representation, including predicate-argument structure, quantification and information structure.CCG relies on...

 parsing. In addition to his contributions to NLP Curran has produced a paper on the development of search engines to assist in driving problem based learning. http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/~james/pubs/pdf/iticse06pbl.pdf

Within NLP he has published papers on combinatory categorial grammar

Combinatory categorial grammar

Combinatory categorial grammar is an efficiently parseable, yet linguistically expressive grammar formalism. It has a transparent interface between surface syntax and underlying semantic representation, including predicate-argument structure, quantification and information structure.CCG relies on...

 parsing as well as question answering

Question answering

In information retrieval and natural language processing , question answering is the task of automatically answering a question posed in natural language...

 systems. http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~james/pubs/

Works

Curran has co-authored software packages such as C&C tools, a CCG

Combinatory categorial grammar

Combinatory categorial grammar is an efficiently parseable, yet linguistically expressive grammar formalism. It has a transparent interface between surface syntax and underlying semantic representation, including predicate-argument structure, quantification and information structure.CCG relies on...

 parser (with Stephen Clark) http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/people/Stephen.Clark/papers/acl07demo.pdf.

Educational work

In addition to his work as a University of Sydney lecturer, Curran directs the National Computer Science School

National Computer Science School

The National Computer Science School is an annual computer science summer school, organised by the School of Information Technologies at the University of Sydney, Australia, which has taken place annually since 1999 over a seven to nine day period in the January school holidays...

, an annual summer school for technologically talented high school students. http://www.ncss.edu.au

External links

• Homepage at the University of Sydney