Associate Professor Stephen Doherty

I am Deputy Head of School (Education) in the School of Humanities & Languages, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, where I lead a significant education portfolio of some 120 continuing and sessional educators across 5 undergraduate programs (17 majors, 22 minors) and 8 postgraduate programs with approximately 250 offerings per year. The portfolio includes strategic academic program and curriculum development and delivery, building staff capacity in cutting-edge educational technology, and building cross-disciplinary and cross-university relationships. 

I am a psychologist and linguist with the role of Associate Professor in Linguistics, Interpreting, and Translation, and lead of the HAL Language Processing Research Lab. With a focus on the psychology of language and technology, my research investigates human and machine language processing using natural language processing techniques and combinations of online and offline methods, mainly eye tracking and psychometrics. My research has been supported by the Australian Research Council, Science Foundation Ireland, the European Union, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters, New South Wales Ministry of Health, Enterprise Ireland, and a range of industry collaborations. As a Chief Investigator, I have a career total of $1.5 million in competitive research grants. 

My current projects include:

     1. Using text analytics to analyse a variety of psychological markers in the linguistic data of large-scale digital humanities archives, including a Discovery Project funded by the Australian Research Council and led by Prof Lisa Ford;

     2. Using computational linguistics to analyse language patterns in multimodal courtroom discourse, including a Linkage Project funded by the Australian Research Council and led by Prof Ludmila Stern;

     3. Investigating the cognitive load and visual attention of remote interpreting in forensic settings, including a project funded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and led by Prof Jane Goodman-Delahunty and Prof Sandra Hale;

     4. Investigating the efficacy of monolingual and multilingual lexical and syntactic simplification techniques to improve output quality for a wide range of real-world applications for linguistically and cognitively diverse user groups in education, entertainment, healthcare, and communications, including projects funded by UNSW Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Special Project Funding;

     5. Using learning and assessment analytics in education, including two Learning and Teaching Innovation research grants funded by UNSW;

     6. Validating a cross-disciplinary methodology using eye tracking and electroencephalography to measure cognitive load and immersion in multimodal language processing contexts. including projects funded by UNSW Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Special Project Funding and in collaboration with Prof Jan-Louis Kruger; 

     7. Exploring the short-term and long-term effects of subtitling and captioning on cognitive load, comprehension, and language proficiency for first and second language users in linguistically and cognitively diverse samples, including projects funded by UNSW Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Special Project Funding;

     8. Investigating the impact of language technologies on our everyday personal and professional lives and using these technologies to break down language barriers on a global scale.

Prior to my appointment at UNSW Sydney (2014), my doctoral (2008–2012) and post-doctoral research positions (2012–2013) were funded by Science Foundation Ireland and supervised by Prof Sharon O'Brien, Prof Dorothy Kenny, and Prof Andy Way at the CNGL Centre for Global Intelligent Content in Dublin City University, a multi-million euro, cross-institutional centre now known as the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology. The ADAPT Centre has brought together more than 150 researchers from CNGL and affiliated centres, which collectively have won more than €100m in funding and have a strong track record of bridging research and innovations to more than 140 industry partnerships. Throughout my work at the centre, I collaborated with a diverse range of university, government, and industry partners in pure and applied research projects, including Symantec, Microsoft, KantanMT, VistaTEC, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, the University of Limerick, and the European Commission. 

My subsequent post-doctoral position (2013–2014), supervised by Prof Josef Van Genabith, was based in the School of Computing and the National Centre for Language Technology at Dublin City University as part of the QTLaunchPad project, a €2.2 million project funded by the European Union through its Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) for research and technological development. I worked with academic and industry partners, including the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the University of Sheffield, the Athena Research and Innovation Centre, the Globalization and Localization Association, META-NET, Welocalize, SAP, and IBM, to establish a framework for high-quality language technology research and development across Europe. The project went on to develop into QT21 in 2015, a €3.9 million project funded by the European Union through its Horizon 2020 program. 

Keywords: language science, psycholinguistics, language processing, language technology, translation technology, translation process studies, machine translation, eye tracking, applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, subtitling and captioning, cognitive science, cognitive psychology, media psychology.

Current research supervision:

1. Qihang Jiang (PhD program): A corpus-based analysis on English-Chinese online fan subtitling.
2. Hang Cui (PhD program): An investigation of Mandarin-speaking interpreters: Interactions with English-speaking legal participants in judicial and quasi-judicial settings (Joint Supervisor with Prof Ludmila Stern).
3. Xiaoyu Zhao (PhD program): A multidimensional goal-oriented investigation of cognitive load and performance over time during simultaneous interpreting between English and Mandarin Chinese (Joint Supervisor with Prof Ludmila Stern).
4. Lu Cao (PhD program): Investigating the efficacy of translation process protocols in the revision of translation amongst Chinese-English translators: An empirical study using eye tracking and screen recording (Joint Supervisor with Prof James Lee).
5. Duoduo Li (PhD program): Tracking the mind during bilingual visual word recognition: Cross-script phonological priming with bilingual speakers of Chinese and English (Joint Supervisor with Prof James Lee).

Completed research supervision:

1. Jiarui Hou (PhD program): An eye-tracking study of the differential effects of tablet, mobile phone, and paper media on incidental second language vocabulary acquisition and second language reading comprehension (Joint Supervisor with Prof James Lee).
2. Wing Shan Chan (PhD): An investigation of subtitles as learning support in university education (Macquarie University as Adjunct Supervisor with Prof Jan-Louis Kruger).
3. Mariana Yonamine (Master of Research): The effect of translation strategies on subtitle processing (Joint Supervisor with Prof James Lee).
4. Xueying Li (PhD): Translation choices to realise logical meaning between English and Chinese (Secondary Supervisor with A/Prof Mira Kim).
5. Sijia Chen (PhD): Exploring the process of note-taking and consecutive interpreting: A pen-eye-voice approach towards cognitive load (Macquarie University as Adjunct Supervisor with Prof Jan-Louis Kruger).
6. Gordon Matthew (PhD): Measuring the cognitive load induced by subtitled audiovisual texts in an educational context (North-West University as Adjunct Supervisor with Prof Jan-Louis Kruger).
7. Hang Cui (Master of Translation and Interpreting): A survey-based investigation of the perceived status of conference and community interpreters and the effects of interpreting modes.
8. Xiaoyu Zhao (Master of Translation and Interpreting): The effect of explicit instruction in symbol usage in note-taking on omissions in consecutive interpreting performance amongst a sample of Chinese L1 and English L2 student interpreters.
9. Sixin Liao (Master of Research): The impact of bilingual subtitles on attention distribution and cognitive load: An eye-tracking study (Macquarie University as Adjunct Supervisor with Prof Jan-Louis Kruger).
10. Muiris Mac Mathuna (Master of Arts): Self-serve English-Irish statistical machine translation (Dublin City University as Secondary Supervisor with Prof Dorothy Kenny).
11. Daniel Marsh (Honours in Linguistics) (Joint Supervisor with Dr Seong-Chul Shin).
12. Rita Louise Quinn (Master of Science): A pattern grammar analysis of a corpus of hotel reviews from hotel review websites (Dublin City University as Secondary Supervisor with Prof Dorothy Kenny).