Richard Tobin

Richard Tobin is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Language, Cognition and Computation (ILCC) within the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on natural language processing applications in biomedical and social science domains, with expertise in text mining and information extraction.

His primary research areas include Natural Language Processing, Text Mining, and Information Extraction. He applies these to biomedical contexts (adverse drug event detection, radiology report analysis) and social sciences (neighborhood health effects via local news analysis). Methodologies involve topic modeling, annotation frameworks, and NLP tool development for real-world validation.

Recent publications (2023-2025) demonstrate strong interdisciplinary trends: topic modeling of local news for neighborhood health insights, systematic reviews of NLP in pharmacovigilance, and rigorous evaluations of clinical NLP tools. His work bridges computer science with public health, geography, and urban studies through practical tool deployment.

Research projects led by Tobin include:

• TextMining TXV-2 (2009, Principal Investigator) - UK industry-funded text mining system development
• Embedding GeoCrossWalk (2008-2009, Principal Investigator) - geospatial data integration research
• Text Mining for biomedical databases (2005-2009, Principal Investigator) - industry collaboration for database curation

He also contributed to "A Live Pulse" (2016-2017), a university-funded project analyzing educational environments through social media data.

Tobin is an active member of the Language Technology Group (LTG) at the University of Edinburgh, which specializes in computational linguistics, NLP tool development, and large-scale text analysis systems.