PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Diana Maynard

Diana Maynard is a researcher whose work spans language tools, fake-news detection and online abuse. She studied computational linguistics and French at UMIST, cognitive science at Manchester, and natural language processing at Manchester Metropolitan University, then joined Sheffield's Computer Science Department in 2000 and coauthored work on GATE. At Sheffield, she led European NLP projects, coauthored a book on the Semantic Web, and contributed to research on journalist safety. Her later papers address few-shot fake-news detection and multilingual abuse detection; as of October 2026, she is a Senior Research Fellow and deputy head of Sheffield's Natural Language Processing group.

Works
223
Citations
5,200
h-index
35
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 19 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 1991–2000

    Degrees in language science

    She completes a BSc in Computational Linguistics and French at UMIST (1991–1995), an MSc in Cognitive Science at the University of Manchester (1995–1996), and a PhD in Natural Language Processing at Manchester Metropolitan University (1997–2000).

  2. 2000–2010

    Research associate at Sheffield

    She joins the University of Sheffield's Computer Science Department as a Research Associate in 2000. In 2002, she coauthors “GATE: an Architecture for Development of Robust HLT applications.”

  3. 2010–2019

    European NLP project leadership

    She becomes a Research Fellow in Sheffield's Computer Science Department in 2010. She serves as principal investigator for the EU projects KNOWMAK (2017–2019), on term extraction and ontology creation, and COMRADES (2016–2018), on social-media analysis for disaster management.

  4. 2017

    A Semantic Web NLP book

    She coauthors Natural Language Processing for the Semantic Web, published by Springer International Publishing in 2017.

  5. 2020–2022

    Research on journalist safety

    She coauthors a 2020 paper that proposes an events-based method for monitoring violations against journalists. In 2022, she is one of the senior researchers on The Chilling, an ICFJ and UNESCO study of online violence against women journalists.

  6. 2024–2025

    Few-shot fake-news detection

    She coauthors Cross-Modal Augmentation (CMA), which adds unimodal features to multimodal features for few-shot fake-news detection. The preprint appears on arXiv in 2024, and the journal article appears in Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence in 2025.

  7. 2026

    A target-aware abuse benchmark

    In 2026, she coauthors TAMA, a target-aware multilingual abuse detection paper that introduces a benchmark of 9,386 posts on X aimed at public figures.

  8. As of October 2026

    Deputy head of NLP

    As of October 2026, she is a Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Head of the Natural Language Processing research group at the University of Sheffield.

Career

  1. Since 2000University of SheffieldResearch Associate, Research Fellow

Education

  1. 2000Manchester Metropolitan UniversityPhD
  2. 1996University of ManchesterMSc
  3. 1995University of Manchester Institute of Science and TechnologyBSc

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. Who cares about Sarcastic Tweets? Investigating the Impact of Sarcasm on Sentiment Analysis2014 · Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) · 376 citations
  2. Analysis of named entity recognition and linking for tweets2014 · Information Processing & Management · 340 citations
  3. The Semantic Web - ISWC 20082008 · Lecture notes in computer science · 325 citationsWith Amit Sheth, Demetri Terzopoulos, Gerhard Weikum, John C. Mitchell, Jon Kleinberg and Madhu Sudan
  4. Automatic Detection of Political Opinions in Tweets2012 · Lecture notes in computer science · 213 citations
  5. Evolving GATE to meet new challenges in language engineering2004 · Natural Language Engineering · 182 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 19 October 2026.

  1. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes University of Sheffield. Our estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.
  2. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers rose from 2% to 32%Includes University of Sheffield. We estimate where leading AI researchers worked when their most-cited papers appeared. The company share rose from 2% in 1975–1979 to 32% in 2020–2024.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes University of Manchester. Our estimates of combined and median h-index at AI organizations, using current affiliations and OpenAlex records.
  4. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1961 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Diana Maynard yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Diana Maynard CV staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. Diana Maynard - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. Diana Maynard - Research Interests staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. Dr Diana Maynard | Computer Science | The University of Sheffield sheffield.ac.uk. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. Strengthening the Monitoring of Violations against Journalists through an Events-Based Methodology | Article | Media and Communication cogitatiopress.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. CFOM Researchers contribute to ground-breaking study on violence against women journalists published by the ICFJ | The Centre for Freedom of the Media cfom.org.uk. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. [2407.12880] Cross-Modal Augmentation for Few-Shot Multimodal Fake News Detection arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.