Research Interests

My research is at the intersection of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, with particular emphasis on semantics. Current topics of interest include:

• Natural Language Understanding
• Question Answering
• Compositional Semantics
• Learning from Multilingual Data

Before joining the department in Oxford and moving (back) into NLP, I did a couple of other things. I have an MA (oxon.) in Computer Science and an MSc in International Politics. Also, I spent some time with the European Commission and several years with McKinsey & Company. Here is my CV.

• 22 Oct 2014: The Dark Blue Labs team is excited to now be a part of Google DeepMind.

• 30 Jul 2014: Watch our ACL 2014 tutorial online: New Directions in Vector Space Models of Meaning.

• 01 Jul 2014: I successfully defended my DPhil on Distributed Representations for Compositional Semantics.

• 06 Mar 2014: Two Long Papers accepted at ACL 2014. I had two long papers accepted for presentation at the ACL 2014 conference. The first paper will be on semantic frame parsing Semantic Frame Identification with Distributed Word Representations (Hermann, Das, Weston and Ganchev), the second is on compositional semantics Multilingual Models for Compositional Distributional Semantics (Hermann and Blunsom).

• 02 Mar 2014: Tutorial New Directions in Vector Space Models of Meaning at ACL 2014. Together with Phil Blunsom, Ed Grefenstette and Giorgiana Dinu, I will hold a tutorial on semantic vector space models at the 2014 ACL conference. We will cover recent advances in machine learning and NLP for modelling (compositional) semantics. Links to slides and video will follow after the conference.

• 03 Apr 2013: Research Internship at Google New York I will spend several months this summer working at Google Research on a project related to Semantic Frame Parsing together with Kuzman Ganchev and Dipanjan Das.

• 14 Feb 2013: Two Long Papers accepted at ACL 2013. I had two long papers accepted for presentation at the ACL 2013 conference. The two papers are entitled The Role of Syntax in Vector Space Models of Compositional Semantics (Hermann and Blunsom) and Parsing Graphs with Hyperedge Replacement Grammars (Chiang, Andreas, Bauer, Hermann, Jones and Knight).