I'm a Professor in Natural Language Generation, within the Natural Language Processing group, Department of Information and Computing Sciences.

My research mostly focusses on the automatic generation of language from non-linguistic information (a.k.a. Natural Language Generation). One important aspect of this is how systems -- artificial or human -- learn meaningful relationships between language and the non-linguistic, especially the perceptual, world.

In my research, I rely on machine learning methods such as neural networks, but also on experimental psycholinguistic methods. Here are some of the topics I explore:

• Data-to-text generation, that is, the automatic summarisation of non-linguistic information, in forms that are understandable by people;
• The vision-language interface, especially image captioning and grounded inference in multimodal, neural models;
• The production and generation of referring expressions, especially the question of what to include in object descriptions in visual scenes;
• Evaluation, that is, how we can determine the quality of the outputs of NLP models (especially generation models).

Apart from these, another long-standing interest is the development of tools and resources for under-resourced languages. In this connection, I've worked quite a bit on NLP for Maltese.