The University of Aberdeen has an active NLP research group with around a dozen members (faculty, postdoc, PhD students). Its not a large group by modern standards, but it is growing and includes a lot of interesting people and projects, so I thought I would write something about the group.

From a numbers perspective, in 2024 group members published 1 book, 6 journal papers, 19 conference papers (including xACL Findings), and many workshop papers. Our papers regularly win awards, including best paper in special theme award in NAACL 2022, INLG test of time and ACL area chair awards in 2023, ICLR spotlight in 2024, and outstanding paper award in NAACL 2025.

In terms of research topics, I suspect we are best known for our work on evaluation. We also work on medical applications of NLP, LLM interpretability, cognitive and psycholinguistics aspects of NLP, and cross-temporal research, among other topics. Much of our work is interdisciplinary, and we work closely with academic colleagues in medicine, psychology, linguistics, and divinity (religious studies), as well as with non-academic organisations such as the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.

From a teaching perspective, we teach two NLP courses to undergraduates, and a specialist NLG course to Masters students. Group members also teach an undergraduate course on Research Methods, and an MSc course on evaluating AI.

History

The Aberdeen NLP group started when I joined in 1995 (30 years ago). Initially the group was very small, but by 2010 we had 20 people (faculty, postdocs, PhD students) and were one of the largest groups in the world which specialised in NL Generation. The group was led by Chris Mellish, and we had some really amazing PhD students and postdocs, including Meg Mitchell, Albert Gatt, Francois Portet, Nava Tintarev, and Saad Mahamood.

Unfortunately, the group then declined as people shifted away for various reasons (eg, Chris retired, I essentially moved from the university to Arria), and by 2020 the group was just a handful of people. So its very exciting to me to see the group growing again!

People

Of course the heart of any research group is its people, so I will conclude this blog by listing group members.

Faculty

Ruizhe Li (www.ruizhe.space) is a Lecturer of Computing Science (similar to Assistant Professor in USA). His research mainly focuses on interpretability of LLMs, especially analysing internal mechanisms of LLMs, and on fusing different modalities for multimodal LLM applications. He actively serves as area chairs of NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP and CIKM. One of his papers was awarded an Area Chair Award of ACL 2023.

Ehud Reiter (https://ehudreiter.com/) is a Professor of Computing Science and has been working on Natural Language Generation for 35 years.  He writes an influential blog about NLG (ehudreiter.com) and recently published a book about NLG.  His research interests focus on high-quality evaluation, especially human evaluation, and on using AI and NLG to help patients make decisions, manage illness, and change behaviour.

Arabella Sinclair (https://j-anie.github.io/) is a Lecturer of Computing Science and has been conducting research on modelling of speaker adaptation and interaction in dialogue for over 10 years.  Her research interests involve the human-centered, cognitive and psycholinguistic aspects of NLP, with a focus on dialogue, interaction, and language learning; in parallel, her research also involves LM interpretability and evaluating contextually relevant generation in LMs.

Yaji Sripada (https://www.abdn.ac.uk/people/yaji.sripada) is a Senior Lecturer in Computing Science.  His research focuses on supporting two-way communication between humans and machines in the context of automating machine learning (ML)/data science life cycle tasks such as data engineering. His work combines ML/data science, knowledge-based programming, natural language technology, and information visualisation (InfoVis).  He is one of the founders of Arria NLG (www.arria.com).

Wei Zhao (https://andyweizhao.github.io/) is a Lecturer in Computing Science. His research interests include evaluation of NLP systems, NLP for cross-temporal research, and more recently, NLP for science. His recent work has been honored with the NAACL outstanding paper award. He is leading two workshops on “LLMs for Cross-Temporal Research” at COLM 2025 and “Towards Human-LLM Collaboration for Ethical and Responsible Science Production” at AACL 2025.

Post-docs

Dave Howcroft (https://www.davehowcroft.com/) is an Advanced Research Fellow in Computing Science and has been researching Natural Language Generation (NLG) for more than a decade. They are on the board of the ACL SIG for Natural Language Generation (SIGGEN) and have given invited talks in the US, the UK, and Germany. Their research interests include machine learning for controllable text generation, linguistic complexity, and experimental design & analysis, especially for human evaluations of NLG systems

PhD Students

Jawwad Baig is a part-time CS PhD student who is developing apps which monitor driving behaviour in UK drivers, and give feedback encouraging safer driving.

Giulia Pucci is a PhD student in CS. Her research mainly concerns the study of Language Models’ generation abilities, and how they reflect human linguistic behaviour.

Adarsa Sivaprasad is a CS PhD student. She focuses on developing explainable AI tools to support patients who use risk assessment models.

Mengxuan (Summer) Sun is a PhD student (joint Computing Science and Medicine) who specializes in the application of Natural Language Generation (NLG) to support patient care in oncology.

Barkavi Sundararajan is a CS PhD student who is exploring the impact of different input representations on the performance of LLMs in data-to-text tasks.

Iniakpokeikiye Thompson is a CS PhD student who is exploring apps that can be used in Nigeria to monitor driving behaviour and encourage safer driving.

Yujun Wang will join us as a CS PhD student in October 2025. She will work on NLP for cross-temporal research, such as temporal biases in LLMs, with applications in AI and humanities.