Researcher

Professor Stephen Doherty

My Expertise

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

Fields of Research (FoR)

Language studies, Translation and interpretation studies, Cybersecurity and privacy, Psycholinguistics (incl. speech production and comprehension), Corpus linguistics, Social psychology, Computational linguistics, Forensic psychology, Digital forensics, Human-computer interaction

Biography

I am a psychologist and linguist at UNSW's Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, where I am also Deputy Dean (Education) and lead the HAL Language Processing Research Lab.

With a focus on the psychology of language and technology, my research investigates human language processing and usage by employing natural language processing techniques and combinations of online and offline methods. As a Chief Investigator, I have a career total...view more

I am a psychologist and linguist at UNSW's Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, where I am also Deputy Dean (Education) and lead the HAL Language Processing Research Lab.

With a focus on the psychology of language and technology, my research investigates human language processing and usage by employing natural language processing techniques and combinations of online and offline methods. As a Chief Investigator, I have a career total of $3 million in competitive research grants and contracted research, and over $50 million in education projects. My research has been supported by the Australian Research Council, Department of Defence, Science Foundation Ireland, the European Commission, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters, NSW Health, Enterprise Ireland, and a diverse range of collaborations, including the Australian Federal Police, Facebook, and Microsoft.

As Deputy Dean (Education), I lead the education portfolio across the Faculty Arts, Design, and Architecture — home to 6 Schools and over 700 staff — to deliver distinctive world-class learning and teaching to over 12k students across 116 programs. As a future-focussed academic leader with HASS and STEM backgrounds, I bring strategic and operational leadership for effective and sustainable technology-enhanced educational innovation, rich and rewarding student experiences, and recognised educational excellence built on a foundation of inclusive and high-performance people and culture. 

My current projects include:

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'BrienProf 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. My role was to establish a consortium of 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. 


My Grants

My current projects include:


My Qualifications

BA (Hons), GradCert, HDip Psych, PhD


My Awards

  • UNSW ADA Research Fellowship (2021–2022)
  • Winner of the UNSW Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences Dean's Research Award for Achievements by an Early Career Researcher (2019)
  • Shortlisted for the UNSW Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences Dean's Research Award for Achievements by an Early Career Researcher (2014, 2015, 2016)
  • Postdoctoral fellowship from Science Foundation Ireland (2012–2013)
  • Doctoral scholarship from Science Foundation Ireland (2008–2012)
View less