About me

I am a Lecturer in the Computer Science department and a member of in the Interaction Lab in the School of MACS (Mathematical and Computer Sciences) at Heriot Watt University. Before that I was at Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and before that I was at ATL, Lockheed Martin, NJ, USA and AT&T Research Labs, NJ U.S.A..

My research interest include evaluation of spoken dialogue systems and evaluation, Natural Language Generation and Health Informatics. I am keen to be involved in any knowledge transfer activities including consulting.  I am also career's officer for Computer Science students at Heriot-Watt. Finally, I am a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Young Academy.

See my Careers and Computer Science blog .

Publications

See my publication page for a full list of publications. Recents publications include:

N. Dethlefs, H.Hastie, H. Cuayáhuitl and O. Lemon (2013). Conditional Random Fields for Responsive Surface Realisation Using Global Features. In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). Sofia, Bulgaria (to appear).

Anja Belz and Helen Hastie (2013). Towards Comparative Evaluation and Shared Tasks for NLG in Interactive Systems. In Srinivas Bangalore and Amanda Stent (eds.) Natural Language Generation in Interactive Systems. Cambridge University Press (to appear).

Scientific Committees

This year (2013) I am reviewing for the following conferences: Interspeech, IVA and MLIS I am also on the REAL Challenge Scientific Commitee, more information on this challenge to come soon.

Current Projects