Paul Buitelaar is Professor in Data Analytics and Deputy Director of the Data Science Institute at the University of Galway where he leads a team in Natural Language Processing. He is co-Director of the SFI Centre for Research Training in AI and co-PI of the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics. His research interests are in the development and use of Natural Language Processing methods for knowledge extraction and semantic-based information access. He has been involved in a large number of national and international funded projects in this area, among which the EU funded projects: Monnet, which developed the lemon model for ontology based lexicons; MixedEmotions, which developed the MixedEmotions toolbox for multilingual, multimodal emotion analysis; Pret-a-LLOD, which developed the LingHub repository for linguistic data; and Pandem-2, which developed a social media analysis framework for analyzing two-way communication between government agencies and the general Public - No restriction in pandemic and other settings. He has further been the originator and lead on the development of the Saffron framework for knowledge extraction from text, which has been used in projects with the Irish Times, Fidelity Investments and Huawei.

Natural Language Processing and semantics, specifically with applications in semantic-based approaches to text mining, data analytics and information access and search, in particular by use of Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies Specific research interests: ontology-based information extraction, ontology learning, taxonomy extraction, term extraction, term translation, ontology translation, semantic similarity, entity linking, relation extraction, linguistic linked data, linked data profiling, emotion and sentiment analysis