Paul Rayson

I am director of the UCREL research centre and a senior lecturer in the School of Computing and Communications (previously the Computing Department), in the Infolab21 building at Lancaster University in Lancaster, UK. My research interests are based on applications of corpus-based natural language processing to address significant challenges in a number of different areas. I am a member of the CREME (Corpus Research in Early Modern English) interdisciplinary research group. I'm also a member of the Investigative Expertise Unit (IEU) based in the Psychology Department and the multidisciplinary centre Security Lancaster. I am the Director of International Teaching Partnerships in the Faculty of Science and Technology.

New stuff:

• The new £3.5m Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) is now running at Lancaster.
• Call for participation: Corpus Analysis with Noise in the Signal (CANS 2013) workshop
• My official university research portal page
• You can follow me on Twitter if you really want to!
• This week I've been mostly reading ... my blog.
• InfoLab21 BlogSpot: Can search engines count? (September 2012)
• Collocate cloud visualisation tool: CONE (released September 2010)
• I co-edit the Corpora Journal published by Edinburgh University Press. Issue 8:1 is now published. We're proofreading issue 8:2 and 9:1.
• ICAME Journal published, printed and distributed by UCREL. Issue 37 has come back from the printers and was published in May 2013.
• Along with Mark Davies (Brigham Young University) I co-edit the Routledge Frequency Dictionaries Series. The Frequency Dictionary of Japanese and the Frequency Dictionary of Russian are now published.

• I'm currently supervising five students: Stephen Wattam (joint with Maths and Stats, co-supervised with Damon Berridge), Matt Edwards (co-supervised with Awais Rashid), Katharina MacInnes and Sheryl Prentice (both joint with Psychology, co-supervised with Paul Taylor), and John Vidler (co-supervised by Andrew Scott).
• Four of my students have passed their vivas: Alistair Baron (spelling variation in historical corpora); Eddie Bell; Ricardo Gacitua (OntoLancs: an evaluation framework for ontology learning by ensemble methods); Patrick Tschorn (Incremental inductive logic programming for learning from annotated corpora)

• SCC120 Fundamentals of Computer Science: Moodle | SCC intranet
• SCC210 Group Project Moodle | SCC intranet

Research:

• iCop: Identifying and Catching Originators in P2P Networks
• Isis: Protecting children in online social networks
• Metaphor in end-of-life care
• Spatial Humanities: Bringing Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to the Digital Humanities
• Variant spellings: in Early Modern English in particular funded by the British Academy.

• There's more information about my academic research and publications on separate pages.
• I used to go to school at Toot Hill in Bingham, Notts and some of my ancestors lived in Rutland.