Dr Arabella Sinclair

Biography

I am very interested in exploring how humans adapt to one another as they interact or communicate. To that end, my work involves analysing human properties of language in a dialogue setting, analysing whether machine generated text contains human-like linguistic properties, and, more recently, analysing whether modern language models exhibit similar patterns to humans when exposed to certain linguistic phenomena. I am interested in applying my work to an educational setting, as well as exploring more general communicative properties of language. My research interests include Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Education.

My undergraduate degree was in Computer Science at the University of Aberdeen, where I gained an interest in Natural Language Processing. I then went on to do a MPhil in advanced computer science at the University of Cambridge, where I was supervised by Simone Teufel. I then spent just under a year in Berlin working as a back end programmer in a software start up, after which I returned to Scotland to do my PhD in Computational Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, where I worked with Jon Oberlander, Dragan Gašević , Adam Lopez and Chris Lucas. I then went on to do a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam, where I was part of the Dialogue Modelling Group, working with Raquel Fernández. 

Research Overview

My work explores speaker adaptation in dialogue, specifically how speakers align to one another as they (try to) find common ground. I have been particularly interested in how this applies to second language learning, although my interests extend to dialogues which foster learning and collaboration in many contexts, and to how humans adapt and communicate in general. My research interests include Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Education.

I am open to PhD supervision within the areas of Dialogue modelling and Computational Linguistics with potential for projects in interpretability and evaluation. If you are interested in these areas and in working with me, please get in contact!

More details can be found on my personal page.