Paula Buttery

Chief Scientist

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Paula Buttery is a Professor of Machine Learning and Language in the Natural Language & Information Processing Group at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge. She is the Co-Director of Cambridge Language Science Interdisciplinary Research Centre and the Lead Scientific Advisor for Cambridge University Press & Assessment. Paula is also part of iLexIR, a consultancy company developing text processing tools with Natural Language Processing technology.

Paula’s research is focused on fundamental questions about language: why have languages evolved to be what they are today? how do we learn languages? how can we learn second languages most efficiently? how should we organise language-related information for particular tasks? Paula’s research team develop Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques to build cognitively-motivated language applications and they conduct research into explanatory AI (artificial intelligence that can explain the decisions it has made and can provide feedback). Paula’s team are also interested in the automatic extraction of units of information from language excerpts (whether written or spoken) and how to represent relationships between these units. Paula has authored 50+ journal articles, papers and books. She has undertaken leadership roles for 10+ funded research projects including the Directorship of the Cambridge Institute for Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA), which is an Artificial Intelligence institute that uses techniques from Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to improve the experience of learning and assessment online. Paula has a PhD in Computational Science and is a Fellow at Gonville and Caius College.