Born and raised in Hamilton, Scotland, Robert Dale received his PhD in
Computational Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh in 1989
under the supervision of Ewan Klein and Graeme Ritchie.  He taught in
the Centre for Cognitive Science at the University of Edinburgh, where
he was Assistant Director of the Human Communication Research Centre
from 1992-1993; in 1994 he took up a position with Microsoft in
Sydney, Australia, and played a key role in building up the natural
language processing community in Australia.  He initiated the NLANZ-L
(Natural Language in Australia and New Zealand) mailing list, the
SALS-SIG (Sydney Area Language and Speech Special Interest Group)
seminar series, and the Australasian Natural Language Processing
Workshop series (which subsequently became the Australasian Language
Technology Workshop), and is a founding member of the Australasian
Language Technology Association.

From 1996 through 1999 he was Director of the Microsoft Research
Institute at Macquarie University; since 2000 he has been Director of
that institution's unique undergraduate program in Language
Technology, and became Director of the newly instituted Centre for
Language Technology in 2001.  From 2005 to 2009, he was Convenor of
HCSNet, the ARC Research Network in Human Communication Science. He is
also Director of Language Technology Pty Ltd, a small consultancy that
provides services in speech and language processing; he publishes a
weekly newsletter called This Week in NLP, and contributes an
occasional column entitied Industry Watch to the Journal of Natural
Language Engineering.

Professor Robert Dale is author or editor of seven books and 140
papers in various aspects of natural language processing.  His current
research interests include automated writing assistance; practical
natural language generation; the engineering of habitable spoken
language dialog systems; and computational, philosophical and
linguistic issues in reference and anaphora.  He is editor of
Computational Linguistics, the field's most prestigious journal, and
has been Program Chair for conferences of both the Association for
Computational Linguistics and the International Conference on Spoken
Language Processing, the two premier events in the field; he was the
Local Organising Committee Chair for the Coling/ACL 2006 conference,
held in Sydney.  He is a Fellow of the Association for Computational
Linguistics.

His motto is:  leave things better than you found them.