The appointment of Stephen Clark in 2004 and the move in 2006 from Oxford's Linguistics department by Prof. Stephen Pulman established a leading group in computational linguistics. Their work encompasses and combines established knowledge-based approaches with statistical and machine learning methods. Their new group, currently comprising 15 members, is growing rapidly and has been particularly successful in attracting top-class doctoral students. The group has links with industry such as Sharp Laboratories of Europe, currently sponsoring an EPSRC CASE studentship, and Corpora Software, fully funding a DPhil student. The group also has interdisciplinary links with other Oxford departments, a notable example being a collaboration with the Engineering Department on robot navigation. It is a partner in the 12M Euro FP6 Companions project for research into learning methods for human-machine dialogues, and the FP7� Europa European Robotic Pedestrian Assistant project. Phil Blunsom, currently in Edinburgh, will join in Oct 2009, replacing Stephen Clark who has moved to Cambridge.
