Tharindu Ranasinghe

Dr. Tharindu Ranasinghe is a Lecturer in Security and Protection Science at the University of Lancaster's Computing and Communications Department. His research focuses on developing machine learning approaches for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, emphasizing NLP for Social Good, with applications in computational social science, digital humanities, and text adaptation. He has published in top-tier journals/conferences like ACL, EMNLP, and COLING. He serves as an Associate Editor for the Natural Language Processing journal and has held roles as Area Chair for major NLP conferences. He co-chairs the NeTTT conference series and the LoResLM workshop, promoting research in translation technology and low-resource language models. His work includes creating datasets like SOLD (Sinhala Offensive Language Dataset) and frameworks like MultiLS for lexical simplification. He has received awards for contributions to offensive language detection and quality estimation research.

His research groups include SCC (Data Science) and UCREL (University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language). He advises PhD student Damith Dola Mullage. Dr. Ranasinghe’s contributions span ethical AI, multilingual NLP, and computational linguistics, addressing societal challenges through technology.