Key Research Centres

There are several UK Institutions with a research focus on text summarization and related fields:

• The University of Manchester’s NLP and Text Mining group led pioneering research in the field of text analytics in the 1980’s and 90’s (at that point part of UMIST). This led to the creation of the world’s first publicly-funded National Centre for Text Mining, which to this day is an internationally-renowned centre for research. The centre is currently run by Professor Sophia Ananiadou and has a biomedical focus [14].

• The Alan Turing Institute, as the centre of UK Artificial Intelligence research, maintains an NLP research group with collaborators from various institutions. Based at the British Library, their focus is on core NLP tasks such as classification, information extraction and summarization, as well as the applications of NLP to the social sciences and humanities. The current organiser is Dr Maria Liakata (University of Warwick), and includes academics from Edinburgh, Cambridge, Oxford, UCL, Lancaster, Imperial and Southampton [15].

• Cardiff University runs a text and data mining group as one of its priority research areas. Headed by Professor Irena Spasic, they recently hosted the UK Healthcare Text Analytics conference [16].

• The NLP Research Group at the University of Sheffield is one of the largest language processing groups in the UK. Established in 1993, this group focuses on machine translation, human-computer dialogue systems, plagiarism detection and NLP for social media [17].