James R. Curran is a

computational linguist Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics ...

and senior lecturer at the

University of Sydney The University of Sydney (USYD), also known as Sydney University, or informally Sydney Uni, is a public research university located in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and is one of the country's si ...

. He holds a PhD in Informatics from the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

Research

Curran's research focuses on

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

, making him one of the few Australian computational linguists. Specifically Curran's research has focused on the area of

known as

combinatory categorial grammar Combinatory categorial grammar (CCG) is an efficiently parsable, yet linguistically expressive grammar formalism. It has a transparent interface between surface syntax and underlying semantic representation, including predicate–argument structure ...

parsing. In addition to his contributions to NLP, Curran has produced a paper on the development of search engines to assist in driving problem based learning. Within NLP, he has published papers on

parsing as well as

question answering Question answering (QA) is a computer science discipline within the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP), which is concerned with building systems that automatically answer questions posed by humans in a natural l ...

systems.

Works

Curran has co-authored software packages such as C&C tools, a CCG parser (with Stephen Clark).

Educational work

In addition to his work as a University of Sydney lecturer, Curran directs the

National Computer Science School The National Computer Science School (NCSS) is an annual computer science summer school, which has taken place annually since 1996 over an eleven-day period in the January school holidays. Attending students participate in an intensive course in ...

, an annual summer school for technologically talented high school students

In 2013, based on their work with NCSS, he and a number of other organisers founded Grok Learning. Curran is also an advocate for embedding computational literacy in the general curriculum, participating in the development of Australia's National Digital Curriculum and presenting the "Python for Every Child in Australia" keynote at PyCon Australia 2014.

References

External links

Homepage at the University of Sydney
{{DEFAULTSORT:Curran, James University of Sydney alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Natural language processing researchers Computational linguistics researchers