Originally born & raised in Liverpool, I did my first degree in Artificial Intelligence at The University of Sussex, a rather oddly titled MSc. on "System Design" at University of Manchester in the Department of Computer Science and a PhD. supervised by Yorick Wilks at the University of Sheffield which I defended in 1998.

I then taught Computational Linguistics at the Dept. of Linguistics at the University of Uppsala briefly in 1998 and then returned to the UK as a post doc at Birmingham. In 2000 I became a lecturer, a Senior Lecturer in 2006 and Professor in 2022.