Diana Maynard

This article is about the British computational linguist. For the fictional soap opera character, see Diana Taylor (General Hospital).

Diana Maynard is a British computer scientist and computational linguist who works as a senior research fellow in the Natural Language Processing Group of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield.

Education and career

Maynard is originally from Chertsey. She was educated in Manchester, earning a bachelor's degree in 1995 at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, a master's degree from the University of Manchester in 1996, and a Ph.D. from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2000,^[1] completed despite becoming nearly blind from complications of Type 1 diabetes during her graduate studies.^[2]

Research

Maynard has been a researcher associated with the General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) project at Sheffield since 2000.^[1] Her research with the project includes the development of the Java Annotation Patterns Engine (JAPE) for using regular expressions to process annotations, as well as research on information extraction and sentiment analysis.

She is also associated with the Centre for Freedom of the Media, a research centre based at Sheffield, with whom she has worked on tools for monitoring attacks on journalists.^[3]

Books

Maynard is a coauthor of the books Text Processing with GATE (University of Sheffield, 2011) and Natural Language Processing for the Semantic Web (Morgan & Claypool, 2017).

Sports

Maynard has been involved in sports all her life, and currently particopates in running, tandem track and road tandem cycling, triathlon, climbing and mountaineering, as well as blind baseball more recently. She has completed 3 marathons and a number of half marathons. In 2025 she was selected for the Great Britain Blind Baseball Team, competing at the European Blind Baseball Championships in Italy. Previously, she has competed in ballroom dancing, womens' football and lacrosse, and slowpitch softball.^{[citation needed]}