Full Seminar Details
Dr Roger Evans
Information Technology Research Institute, University of Brighton
This event took place on Wednesday 27 October 2004 at 12:45
The RAGS project ('Reference Architecture for Generation Systems'; Brighton/Edinburgh, EPSRC) aimed to build a concrete infrastructure for collaborative Natural Language Generation (NLG) research, founded on an apparent emerging architectural consensus among NLG system builders. However, a detailed survey of these existing systems revealed that the 'consensus' was much less secure than it appeared at first sight. In order to achieve the goals of the project, we started to develop a much more sophisticated view of system architectures, flexible enough to accommodate existing research, yet precise enough to make a useful contribution as a collaborative 'plug-and-play' framework for NLG. The resulting approach asks interesting and challenging questions about the nature of data manipulation and functional 'modulehood' in large, complex, computational systems.
In this talk, I will describe the progressive development of these ideas, from the starting point of the problem revealed by the RAGS survey, through the RAGS two-level data model and functional architecture for NLG systems, and its implementation in the OASYS system, to subsequent work with Chris Mellish on functional vs implementation architectures, and my current ideas for developing a more generic architectural substrate.
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