Dr Paul Rayson is Professor of Natural Language Processing at Lancaster University, UK. He is director of the UCREL interdisciplinary research centre which carries out research in corpus linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). A long term focus of his work is the application of semantic-based NLP in extreme circumstances where language is noisy e.g. in historical, learner, speech, email, txt and other CMC varieties. His applied research is in the areas of online child protection, learner dictionaries, and text mining of historical corpora and annual financial reports. He is a co-investigator of the five-year ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) which is designed to bring the corpus approach to bear on a range of social sciences.