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Dr Paul Nulty

Positions held:
  • Lecturer, School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences
  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    I have always been interested in understanding language, meaning, and cognition in humans and machines. I studied linguistics and computer science at University College Dublin (UCD), and stayed on there to complete my PhD in 2013 under the supervision of Dr. Fintan Costello. My thesis work centred on computational models of conceptual combination, with a final focus on statistical methods for ranking natural language expressions of semantic relations between nouns in English noun-noun combinations.

    I then worked on a number of postdoc projects, first on the QUANTESS project at LSE (2013-2015), working on methods for the analysis of social and political texts in R, and then at the Cambridge Concept Lab (2016-2018), where I developed methods for detecting and visualising semantic networks from historical texts. From 2018-2021 I held a Marie-Curie CareerFit fellowship at UCD, working with Corlytics (a Dublin-based RegTech company). I joined ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú as a lecturer in 2021.

    Beyond lexical semantics, I am broadly interested in applications of natural language processing to problems in the humanities and social sciences, and I collaborate widely in those areas.

    Highlights

    • I recently published a chapter in the book based on the work of the Cambridge Concept Lab project: discusses methods for discovering conceptual structures in text and visualising them with semantic networks. (preprint available on BiRON in publications section)

    ORCID

  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Supervision

    Supervisions within ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú:
    1

    I am currently supervising three PhD students:

    Dima Bsata (Kathleen Booth Anniversary PhD Scholarship) is working on using natural language processing methods to assess aspect-based sentiment in university students' written feedback.

    Shibu Kurian is applying deep learning for document classification in the legal and regulatory domain.

    Tom Salaam's project develops natural language processing methods applications for financial sentiment analysis.

    Teaching

    Teaching modules

    • Natural Language Processing
    • Software and Programming II
  • Publications

    Publications

    Article

    • Brady, O. and Nulty, Paul and Zhang, L. and Ward, T.E. and McGovern, D.P. (2025) . Nature Reviews Psychology 4, pp. 777-792. ISSN 2731-0574.
    • Zhang, G. and Nulty, Paul and Lillis, D. (2022) . Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities NLP4DH, ISSN 2416-5999.

    Book section

    • Nulty, Paul (2023) . In: de Bolla, P. (ed.) Explorations in the Digital History of Ideas - New Methods and Computational Approaches Search within full text. Cambridge University Press. pp. 54-76. ISBN 9781009263610.
    • Zhang, G. and Nulty, Paul and Lillis, D. (2023) . In: Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law. ACM Digital LIbrary. pp. 371-380. ISBN 9798400701979.
    • Zhang, G. and Nulty, Paul and Lillis, D. (2022) . In: Rosso, P. and Basile, V. and Martínez, R. and Métais, E. and Meziane, F. (eds.) Natural Language Processing and Information Systems - 27th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2022, Valencia, Spain, June 15–17, 2022, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer. pp. 240-252. ISBN 9783031084720.
    • Nulty, Paul (2007) . In: Carroll, J.A. and van den Bosch, A. and Zaenen, A. (eds.) Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2007. The Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 79-84.
    • Nulty, Paul and Marquez i Villodre, l. and Wicentowski, R. (2007) . In: Agirre, E. (ed.) Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations: SemEval@ACL 2007. The Association for Computer Linguistics. pp. 374-377.