Arabella Sinclair

Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Aberdeen

Session: The human side of conversational AI

Arabella Sinclair is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Aberdeen, where she is a member of the Computational Linguistics group. Prior to joining the University of Aberdeen, she held a postdoctoral researcher post at the University of Amsterdam, where she was part of the Dialogue Modelling Group within the Institute of Language Logic and Computation. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in Computational Linguistics for her thesis: Modelling speaker adaptation in second language learner dialogue. Her research interests fall at the intersection of computational psycholinguistics, natural language processing, and AI. She explores language use in interactive settings, with a particular interest in how speakers adapt to one another in dialogue. Her current work involves investigating adaptive, audience aware models of language, and gaining an increased understanding of human and model linguistic behaviour. She has experience working on adapting language models for more personalised smart assistants and analysing differences in second language learner behaviour when interacting with a human Vs. an AI language tutor. More recently, as a co-recipient of a Creative Informatics small research grant, for the project Collaborative Storytelling with an AI Author, she is exploring the effects of language style on how large language models can serve as creative writing tools.