Paula Buttery

Dr. Paula Buttery is a Professor at the University of Cambridge, affiliated with the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics and the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. She serves as the Director of the Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA) Institute, focusing on computational approaches to language learning and endangered language revitalization.

Her research spans Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Psycholinguistics, and Language Acquisition, with particular emphasis on non-canonical language forms (e.g., spoken learner language, aphasics) and low-resource language processing. She has lead projects funded by the Cambridge English Language Assessment, EPSRC, and the Wellcome Trust.

Dr. Buttery’s recent publications explore topics such as disfluency detection, lexical diversity, subcategorization frames, and spoken learner language modeling. Her work bridges machine learning and cognitive science to develop tools for language education and endangered language preservation.

Scientific Awards:

• Cambridge University Pilkington Prize for teaching (2015)

She has contributed to interdisciplinary collaborations, including the Cambridge Cookie-Theft Corpus for speech analysis in brain-damaged patients and the UKPMC project for biomedical text mining. Her teaching centers on Computational Linguistics and Language Learning.