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Research carried out at Sussex into the automatic grammatical analysis of English text has enabled and enhanced a range of commercial text-processing applications and services. These include an automatic SMS question-answering service and a computer system that grades essays written by learners of English as a second language. Over the REF period there has been substantial economic impact on a spin-out company, whose viability has been established through revenue of around £500k from licensing, development and maintenance contracts for these applications.
The success of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has been due in large part to the technologies built around it for constraining, querying, styling and otherwise processing XML documents. Research carried out at Edinburgh has been instrumental in the creation and/or design of many of these core XML technologies, including XSLT, XML Schema, XInclude, XQuery and XProc. Edinburgh staff played key roles in bringing these technologies into widespread use in both the private and public sectors through participation in standards development work.
As a writer of popular (linguistic) science, and as the subject of a documentary film on his life and work, Professor Dan Everett's research on Amazonian languages like Pirahã has widely influenced popular understanding and debate about the relations between language, mind and culture. The spectacular, and sometimes controversial, conclusions of his fieldwork, theoretical and popular writings challenge the claim that all human beings are endowed with an innate language faculty and challenge the ways in which cultural values are constructed.
The EPP Project identifies criterial features for second language acquisition. It has engaged stakeholders in the teaching and testing of language learners. This is facilitated by the EPP network and website. The project has enabled Cambridge Assessment to define the English language constructs underlying Cambridge examinations at different proficiency levels more explicitly. The work has improved the tests themselves, but also allowed Cambridge Assessment to better communicate the qualities of their tests for accreditation and recognition. Stakeholders are more actively engaged through provision of resources for teachers, testers, ministries of education etc., on the website, and in seminars. The project has led to further research with an international language school, which has led to teachers and parents of the school pupils being more aware of the needs for successful second language acquisition.
COnnecting REpositories (CORE) is a system for aggregating, harvesting and semantically enriching documents. As at July 2013, CORE contains 15m+ open access research papers from worldwide repositories and journals, on any topic and in more than 40 languages. In July 2013, CORE recorded 500k+ visits from 90k+ unique visitors. By processing both full-text and metadata, CORE serves four communities: researchers searching research materials; repository managers needing analytical information about their repositories; funders wanting to evaluate the impact of funded projects; and developers of new knowledge-mining technologies. The CORE semantic recommender has been integrated with digital libraries and repositories of cultural institutions, including the European Library and UNESCO. CORE has been selected to be the metadata aggregator of the UK's national open access services.
Professor David Crystal's world-leading research on language policy, diversity and usage, conducted at Bangor since 2000, has led to a transformation in terms of public and political attitudes, both nationally and internationally, towards the nature and use of language in public and private discourse. In particular, the research has led, since 2008, to an increased awareness of linguistic diversity, changes to governmental policies on language, and the development of the world's first targeted online advertising technology, which today indexes billions of impressions across 11 languages to provide real-time data services in the emerging online advertising world.
In 1997 Professor David MacKay of the University of Cambridge Department of Physics developed Dasher, a software accessibility tool for entering text by zooming through letters displayed on a screen. Dasher has since transformed computing for tens of thousands of individuals unable to use a normal keyboard, and is recommended by many charities involved in assistive technologies, such as the European Platform for Rehabilitation network. Since 2008, Dasher has been downloaded over 75,000 times and has been ported to smart phones, making use of input devices such as tilt sensors and joysticks. Linking Dasher's information-efficient text generation from gestures or gaze direction to text-to-speech or real-time-text output channels has made Dasher an ideal component of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems which address digital exclusion.
Research by Macaro and collaborators since 1999 led to the distillation of eight principles regarding foreign language pedagogy, and to the development of video- and paper-based materials to support the application of these principles in teacher pedagogy and in teacher education programmes in England. The application in Schools and Higher Education Institutions was facilitated through an ESRC-funded impact project involving language teachers and teacher educators, and it was extended and sustained through the creation of practitioner clusters based on the research. Teachers report that changes have taken place in their modern languages departments following engagement with the research, with benefit to student learning; these changes have included much greater, and better quality, interaction in the foreign language, and a greater focus on processes and strategies in skills development. Teacher education programme providers have incorporated the research-based principles into their programmes, with impact on their student-teachers' practice.
Worldwide impact on language learners and others has been generated by the development at Lancaster of a ground-breaking natural language processing tool (CLAWS4), and an associated unique collection of natural language data (the British National Corpus, or BNC). Some highlights selected from the primary impacts are as follows:
The pathways to impact have been primarily via consultancy and via licencing of software IP. The impact itself is largely on the language learners—i.e. users of products such as the above. There is a secondary economic impact on a UK SME which has licenced our software.
Biak (West Papua, Indonesia) is an endangered language with no previously established orthography. Dalrymple and Mofu's ESRC-supported project created the first on-line database of digital audio and video Biak texts with linguistically analysed transcriptions and translations (one of the first ever for an endangered language), making these materials available for future generations and aiding the sustainability of the language. Biak school-children can now use educational materials, including dictionaries, based on project resources. The project also trained local researchers in best practice in language documentation, enabling others to replicate these methods and empowering local communities to save their own endangered languages.