Professor Stephen Doherty

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 ADA 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 1,00 staff — to deliver distinctive world-class learning and teaching to over 14k students across 120 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 research projects include:

• Improving the detection and countering of misinformation and disinformation, including a National Intelligence and Security Discovery Research Grant funded by the Department of Defence with Prof Monica Whitty and Prof Richard Sinnott
• Forensic analysis of psychological and language data for diverse applications in research and practice, including domestic and international defence and intelligence operations, information warfare, and commercial collaborators in legal, ICT, psychological interventions and social policy
• Facebook Research Award: People and models of people with A/Prof Rob Nicholls and Prof Monica Whitty, which aims to improve modelling techniques of online behaviour in social media by examining how we predict behaviours that apply heuristics and deep thinking
• Detecting cybersecurity threats and exploiting cyber intelligence from blended sources using natural language processing and dynamic graph neural networks – industry collaboration with Avertro, and Prof Sanjay Jha and Dr Jiaojiao Jiang
• Using text analytics to identify and analyse a variety of psychological markers in the linguistic data of large-scale digital humanities archives, including a Discovery Project funded by the Australian Research Council with Prof Lisa Ford, Prof Kirsten McKenzie, A/Prof David Roberts, and Dr Naomi Parkinson;
• Using computational linguistics to analyse language patterns in multimodal legal discourse, including a Linkage Project funded by the Australian Research Council with Prof Ludmila Stern, Prof Sandra Hale, A/Prof Melanie Schwartz, and Dr Julie Lim. 
• Investigating the visual attention, cognitive load and performance of online interpreting in forensic settings, including a project funded by a UNSW ADA Research Fellowship, and by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's High-Value Detainee Group led by Prof Jane Goodman-Delahunty and Prof Sandra Hale;
• Investigating the efficacy of monolingual and multilingual lexical and syntactic simplification techniques to improve output quality for a wide range of real-world applications for linguistically and cognitively diverse user groups in education, entertainment, healthcare, and communications, including projects funded by a UNSW ADA Research Fellowship and UNSW Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Special Project Funding;
• Using learning and assessment analytics in education, including two Learning and Teaching Innovation research grants funded by UNSW;
• Exploring the short-term and long-term effects of subtitling and captioning (cognitive load, immersion, comprehension, performance, and language proficiency) for first and second language users in linguistically and cognitively diverse samples, including projects funded by a UNSW ADA Research Fellowship and UNSW Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Special Project Funding.

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'Brien, Prof 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.