Professor Eric Atwell

Dr Eric Atwell’s research speciality is corpus linguistics and text analytics: Machine Learning and Data Mining analysis of a CORPUS of text – in English, Arabic, or other languages – to analyse the text and detect “interesting” and “useful” features or patterns. For example: Detecting terrorist activities, by analysis of documents from terrorist suspects, to highlight suspicious parts of the text; Analysis and text-mining of the Quran, to find links and patterns in the Quran verses and chapters which are of interest to Islamic and Religious Studies scholars; Detecting cause of death from verbal autopsy text documents describing the circumstances of the death. He leads research projects, including the Leeds contribution to EPSRC/ESRC/CPNI-funded 2.2M-pound research project IDEAS factory – detecting terrorist activities: making sense, as featured in The Engineer; JISC-funded project e-Health GATEwayto the Clouds to enable secure research access to anonymized e-Health patient records; HEA-funded project to collect web-based resources for teaching and research in Islamic Studies, and EPSRC-funded project Natural language processing working together with Arabic and Islamic Studies.