Computing Science Department
University of Aberdeen
I am an academic working in Computational Linguistics, the area of Artificial Intelligence where Computer Science meets Linguistics. My main areas of expertise are Computational Semantics and Natural Language Generation. I take a lively interest in logical and philosophical issues arising in these areas.
Brief CV: (An extended version can be found here )
My work centers around the question how information can be expressed in a way that is most suitable for human readers/hearers. One type of example arises when text and speech are generated from the facts or formulas in a knowledge base. Another is the design of Embodied Conversational Agents. One of my main research interests is the generation of complex referring expressions, as when we program a computer to refer to 'your last email to University Registry', or to 'the icon at the top-left of your screen'. Another of my interests is the role of vagueness (also known as fuzziness) in communication, which is the focus of my book ``Not Exactly: in Praise of Vagueness``, to appear with Oxford University Press in January 2010. (See associated web site).
In my work, I try to bridge the gap that sometimes exists between theoretical and applied work, solving practical problems in a theoretically sound way (on a good day!) and using concrete algorithms to address theoretical problems. This often brings in in contact with neighbouring disciplines such as psycholinguistics and philosophical logic.
(1991) ``Coherence and the Logic of Ambiguity". In Proc. of 8th Amsterdam Colloquium, University of Amsterdam.
(1995)
The Sorites Fallacy and the Context-dependence of Vague Predicates.
In Kanazawa, Pinon and de Swart (eds.), "Quantifiers,
Deduction, and Context". CSLI Publications, Stanford, Ca.,
pp.59-86.
(1995)
Towards a Logic of Ambiguous Expressions.
In Van Deemter and Peters (eds.) "Semantic Ambiguity
and Underspecification", pp.203-237.
CSLI Publications, Stanford, Ca. To buy the entire collection of papers, go
here. Here is a review.
(1998)
Ambiguity and Idiosyncratic Interpretation.
Journal of Semantics Vol. 15 (1), 1998, pp.5-36.
(2004) Finetuning an NLG system through experiments with human subjects: the case of vague descriptions. In Procs. of 3rd International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG-04), Brockenhurst, UK.
(2006) Generating Referring Expressions that involve Gradable Properties. Computational Linguistics (32) 2, 2006.
(2009) What Game Theory can do for NLG: the case of vague language. Keynote paper, 12th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG-2009), Athens, Greece.
(2009)
Utility and language generation: the case of vagueness.
To appear in Journal of Philosophical Logic 38 (6).
(1992) Towards a Generalization of Anaphora.
(1998)
On the Interpretation of Anaphoric Noun Phrases:
Towards a Full Understanding of Partial Matches.
(1997)
Context Modeling and the Generation of Spoken Discourse.
(2004)
``Towards a probabilistic version of bidirectional
OT syntax and semantics.''.
Journal of Semantics, 21(3) August 2004.
(2005)
``Real vs. template-based NLG: a false opposition?''
Computational Linguistics 31 (1), 2005.
(2009)
``What Game Theory can do for NLG: the case of vague language''.
Keynote paper, 12th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG-2009).
(2000)
Generating Vague Descriptions ,
(2000)
On Coreferring: Coreference in MUC and related annotation schemes.
(2001)
Logical Form Equivalence: the case of Referring Expressions Generation,
in Procs. of 8th Europaean Workshop on Natural Language Generation (EWNLG2001),
Toulouse.
(2002)
Generating Referring Expressions:
Boolean Extensions of the Incremental Algorithm.
Computational Linguistics 28 (1) p.37-52.
(2004)
Finetuning an NLG system through experiments with human
subjects: the case of vague descriptions. In Procs. of 3rd International
Conference on Natural Language Generation ({\sc inlg-04}),
Brockenhurst, UK.
(2006)
"Generating Referring Expressions that involve Gradable
Properties". Computational Linguistics (32) 2,
2006.
(2006)
``Graphs and Booleans: on the
generation of referring expressions'' In
H.Bunt and R.Muskens (Eds.) ``Computing
Meaning, Volume 3", Studies in Linguistics and
Philosophy, Kluwer, Dordrecht.
(2007)
``A Conceptual Graph Approach to the Generation of
Referring Expressions" In Procs. of
IJCAI-2007, Hyderabad, India.
(2007)
``Generating Referring Expressions:
Making Referents Easy to Identity''.
Computational Linguistics 33 (2).
(1993) What's New? A Semantic Perspective on Sentence Accent.
(1998)
Towards a Blackboard Model of Accenting.
(1999)
Document Generation and Picture Retrieval .
(2003)
``High-Level Authoring of Illustrated Documents" .
Natural Language Engineering 9 (2), June 2003.
(2005)
``Generating Multimedia Presentations: from Plain Text to Screenplay''.
In O. Stock and M. Zancanara (Eds.) Intelligent
Multimodal Information Presentation, Vol.27.
Kluwer Publishing, Dordrecht.
(2008) ``Fully generated Scripted Dialogue for Embodied Conversational Agents''.
(Near-final version.) Artificial Intelligence Journal Vol 172/10, pp. 1219-1244
Journal of Semantics 9, 1992, pp.27-51.
Journal of Semantics Vol. 15 (2), 1998, pp. 355-392.
(With E. Krahmer.)
Speech Communication 21 (1997) p. 101-121.
(With Jan Odijk.)
(With Krahmer and Theune).
in Procs. of First International
Conf. on Natural Language Generation (INLG-2000), Mitzpe Ramon.
Computational Linguistics 26, No. 4, Dec. 2000.
(With Rodger Kibble.)
(With Magnus Halldorssson)
(With Emiel Krahmer)
(With Madalina Croitoru)
(With Ivandre Paraboni and Judith Masthoff)
Journal of Semantics 11, 1993, pp.1-31.
Computer Speech and Language 12 (3), 1998.
In Proc. of Third International Conference on Visual
Information Systems (VISUAL99), Amsterdam, June 1999.
(With Richard Power)
(With Piwek, Power, and Scott)
(With Brigitte Krenn, Paul Piwek, Marc Schroeder, Martin Klesen and Stefan Baumann.)