Euan McGill

Euan McGill

I am a linguist and PhD researcher in Natural Language Processing at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. I work on the EU Horizon 2020 project SignON, which aims to develop a spoken-to-sign language translation platform accessible to all. My academic research centres on accessibility in NLP, including Automatic Text Simplification, Corpus Linguistics, Machine Translation, and data augmentation methods. I am also passionate about democracy and the political geography of Britain.

CV (PDF)   Google Scholar   ORCID   GitHub

Updates

Attended EURALEX 2026 in Vienna on behalf of the Cambridge Dictionary.

I successfully defended my doctoral thesis “The Data Problem behind Sign Language Translation” and achieved the grade Cum Laude.

Joined Cambridge University Press and Assessment as Senior Manager, Data Architecture and Analytics.

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Projects

Proportional Representation in the UK

Exploring what UK political history could have looked like under proportional representation.

BSL-Hansard

A parallel, multimodal corpus of English and interpreted British Sign Language data from parliamentary proceedings.

Paper (2023)

SignON

A spoken-to-sign language translation platform with accessibility at its centre.

More projects on GitHub

Publications

Machine translation

Linguistic Processing for Sign Language Translation

Saggion, H., McGill, E., Chiruzzo, L., & Egea Gómez, S.

In: Way, A., Leeson, L., & Shterionov, D. (eds.), Sign Language Machine Translation. Springer, . Book chapter.

TRIBBLE: TRanslating IBerian languages Based on Limited E-resources

Kuzmin, I., Przybyła, P., McGill, E. & Saggion, H.

Shared Task: Translation into Low-Resource Languages of Spain @ Ninth Conference on Machine Translation (WMT24), , pp. 955-959. Miami, Florida, USA.

Can True Zero-shot methods with Large Language Models be Adopted for Sign Language Translation?

McGill, E. & Saggion, H.

Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Knowledge-Enhanced Machine Translation (KEMT2024), , pp. 40-43. Sheffield, England.

Bootstrapping Pre-trained Word Embeddings for Sign Language Gloss Translation

McGill, E., Chiruzzo, L., & Saggion, H.

Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT 2024), , pp. 116-132. Sheffield, England.

SignON - a Co-creative Machine Translation for Sign and Spoken Languages (end-of-project results, contributions and lessons learned)

Vandeghinste, V., Shterionov, D., De Sisto, M., Brady, De Coster, M., Leeson, L., Blat, J., Picron, F., Scipioni, M. P., Parikh, A., ten Bosch, L., O’Flaherty, J., Dambre, J., Rijckaert, J., Vanroy, B., Ubieto Nogales, V., Egea Gómez, S., Schuurman, I., Labaka, G., Núñez Marcos, A., Murtagh, I., McGill, E., & Saggion, H.

Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT 2024), , pp. 49-50. Sheffield, England.

SignON Sign Language Translation: Progress and Challenges

Vandeghinste, V., Shterionov, D., De Sisto, M., Brady, De Coster, M., Leeson, L., Blat, J., Picron, F., Scipioni, M. P., Parikh, A., ten Bosch, L., O’Flaherty, J., Dambre, J., Rijckaert, J., Vanroy, B., Ubieto Nogales, V., Egea Gómez, S., Schuurman, I., Labaka, G., Núñez Marcos, A., Murtagh, I., McGill, E., & Saggion, H.

Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT 2023), , pp. 501-502. Tampere, Finland.

BSL-Hansard: A parallel, multimodal corpus of English and interpreted British Sign Language data from parliamentary proceedings

McGill, E. & Saggion, H.

Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Automatic Translation for Signed and Spoken Languages (AT4SSL), , pp. 43-48. Tampere, Finland.

Corpus

Part-of-Speech tagging Spanish Sign Language data and its applications in Sign Language machine translation

McGill, E., Chiruzzo, L., Egea Gómez, S., & Saggion, H.

Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Resources and Representations for Under-Resourced Languages and Domains (RESOURCEFUL-2023), , pp. 70-76. Tórshavn, Faroe Islands.

Translating Spanish into Spanish Sign Language: Combining Rules and Data-driven Approaches

Chiruzzo, L., McGill, E., Egea Gómez, S., & Saggion, H.

Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2022), , pp. 75-83. Gyeongju, Republic of Korea.

Linguistically Enhanced Text to Sign Gloss Machine Translation

Egea Gómez, S., Chiruzzo, L., McGill, E., & Saggion, H.

Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Natural Language & Information Systems (NLDB 2022), , pp. 172-183. València, Spain.

Syntax-aware Transformers for Neural Machine Translation: The case of text to sign gloss translation

Egea Gómez, McGill, E., & Saggion, H.

Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora (BUCC 2021), , pp. 18-27. Online.

Misinformation detection

Attacking Misinformation Detection Using Adversarial Examples Generated by Language Models

Przybyła, P., McGill, E. & Saggion, H.

The 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025), . Suzhou, China.

Know Thine Enemy: Adaptive Attacks on Misinformation Detection Using Reinforcement Learning

Przybyła, P., McGill, E. & Saggion, H.

Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis (WASSA 2024), , pp. 125-140. Bangkok, Thailand.

Sign Language Recognition

Spontaneous Catalan Sign Language Recognition: Data Acquisition and Classification

Garmendia, N., Saggion, H., & McGill, E.

Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Automatic Translation for Signed and Spoken Languages (AT4SSL), , pp. 7-15. Geneva, Switzerland.

Accessibility in NLP

Tailoring Automatic Text Simplification Output for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Adults

McGill, E.

Proceedings of the Doctoral Symposium on Natural Language Processing from the PLN.net network 2021, , pp. 50-59. Jaén, Spain.

Sociolinguistics

An intraspeaker variation study of Scottish /r/ pharyngealisation

Purse, R. & McGill, E.

Lifespans & Styles, 2(2), , pp. 36-44.