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KMi Seminars
Syntactic measuring of language distances
This event took place on Friday 17 December 2010 at 13:00

 
Prof. Giuseppe Longobardi University of Trieste

Beyond its theoretical success, the development of molecular biology has brought about the possibility of extraordinary progress in the historical study of classification and distribution of different species and different human populations, introducing a new level of evidence on diversity (molecular genetic markers) apt, among other things, to quantitative and automatic treatment. I claim that, even in the cognitive sciences, purely theoretical progress in a certain discipline, such as linguistics, may have analogous historical impact, and in turn be confirmed by such results. Thus, I will propose to unify two unrelated lines of investigation:

  1. the study of syntactic variation (parameter theory) in the biolinguistic program
  2. the reconstruction of phylogenetic relatedness among languages
I will suggest that we are now in the position of measuring the syntactic distance among different languages and populations in a precise fashion and to explore its historical significance through the application of clustering algorithms borrowed from computational biology. The historical success of the resulting taxonomies may then support the reliability of the new method of distance calculation.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.