KMi Seminars
The role of layout in natural language processing (NLP)
This event took place on Monday 01 November 2004 at 12:45

 
Prof. Donia Scott Centre for Research in Computing, The Open University, UK

This talk will present the case for abstract document structure as a separate descriptive level in the analysis and generation of written texts. The purpose of this representation is to mediate between the message of a text (i.e., its discourse structure) and its physical presentation (i.e., its organisation into graphical constituents like sections, paragraphs, sentences, bulleted lists, figures, footnotes and so forth). Abstract document structure can be seen as an extension of Nunberg's `text-grammar'; it is also closely related to `logical' mark-up in languages like HTML and LaTeX. I will argue that by using this intermediate representation, several subtasks in language generation and language understanding can be defined more cleanly.

Biography

Donia Scott is professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Brighton, where she has been director of the Information Technology Research Institute since 1991. During this period she has built a research group specializing in several areas of computational linguistics, especially natural language generation (NLG), lexical representation, and corpus linguistics. Her own research has focused on multilingual NLG, and on the realization of rhetorical relationships through layout, punctuation, and discourse connectives. Earlier in her career Professor Scott worked for some years on speech and intonation, at Sussex University and Philips Research Laboratories.

Download PowerPoint Presentation (2.6Mb ZIP file)

 
KMi Seminars Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.