I am a digital humanist and computational linguist. Before joining King's in 2021, I was Turing research fellow at The Alan Turing Institute and at the University of Cambridge between 2017 and 2021. Before that, I worked as language technologist in the Dictionary division of Oxford University Press and as data scientist in the Open Research Group of Springer Nature. I obtained my PhD in computational linguistics from the University of Pisa (Italy) in 2010, after a Master's degree in Mathematics and a Bachelor's degree in Classics from the University of Firenze (Italy). I am Editor in Chief of the Journal of Open Humanities Data and convenor of the MA programme in Digital Humanities at King’s.

I am Principal Investigator of the ERC-selected project COALA (Computational Corpus Annotation for Quantitative Analysis of Latin Lexical Semantics) funded by UK Research and Innovation (€2M).

Research interests and PhD supervision

My research interests lie at the intersection between computational and quantitative methods and research questions in the Humanities. I am particularly interested in the following topics:

• Computational models of word meaning
• Analysis of semantic change via quantitative and computational methods in ancient languages (Latin and ancient Greek), historical texts and in contemporary data
• Time-aware natural language processing
• Computational lexicography
• Open data publishing in the humanities

Teaching

I teach a range of topics, including text processing and quantitative text analysis, natural language processing, and quantitative and computational methods for the the humanities.

Expertise and public engagement

My research was featured in the Christmas 2020 edition of the Economist "How data analysis can enrich the liberal arts", BBC, and British Council.

In 2022 I was awarded the Inter Circle U. Prize for inter- and trans-disciplinary research for my work on the project “The Language of Mechanisation”.

The videos of my talks and interviews can be found in this Youtube playlist.

Selected publications

• Jain, N., Di Bonaventura, C., Penuela, A.M. and McGillivray, B., 2025. An Annotation Protocol for Diachronic Evaluation of Semantic Drift in Disability Sources. In Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW 2025). Association for Computational Linguistics.
• McGillivray B, Marongiu P, Pedrazzini N, Ribary M, Wigdorowitz M, Zordan E. Deep Impact: A Study on the Impact of Data Papers and Datasets in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Publications. 2022 Oct 14.
• McGillivray, B., Pedrazzini, N., Ciula, A., Lawrence, J., Ong, T., Ridge, M. and Vieira, J.M.M., 2025. Analysing the language of mechanisation in nineteenth-century British newspapers. In Living with Machines: Computational Histories of the Age of Industry. University of London Press.
• Di Bonaventura, C., Siciliani, L., Basile, P., Meroño-Peñuela, A. and McGillivray, B., From Detection to Explanation: Effective Learning Strategies for LLMs in Online Abusive Language Research.
• Ghinassi, I., Tedeschi, S., Marongiu, P., Navigli, R. and McGillivray, B., Language Pivoting from Parallel Corpora for Word Sense Disambiguation of Historical Languages: a Case Study on Latin.