Kees van Deemter
Computing Science Department
University of Aberdeen

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Background

I am an academic working in Computational Linguistics, the area of Artificial Intelligence where Computer Science meets Linguistics. My main expertise is in 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 )

• 1984-1997: Philips Research Laboratories , Institute for Perception Research (IPO), Eindhoven (Netherlands). Highlights include:
  • 1991: Ph.D., University of Amsterdam, at what is now the ILLC . Thesis "On the Composition of Meaning".
  • 1992-1993: Postdoctoral researcher (Visiting Scholar), Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University.
• 1997-2004: Principal Research Fellow, Information Technology Research Institute (ITRI) University of Brighton.
• 2004-present: Reader, Department of Computing Science University of Aberdeen. Member of the Aberdeen Natural Language Generation group.

Current and recent teaching

• Aberdeen (from 2007 onwards): Formal Models of Computation (CS4026).
• Aberdeen (from 2007 onwards): Industrial Placement (CS4016).
• Aberdeen (from 2009 onwards): Formal Languages and Computability (CS3518).
• LOT Winter School 2008, University of Tilburg, The Netherlands: Generation of Referring Expressions: the State of the Art. (Course directory)
• HIT Summer School 2008, Harbin Institute of Technology, China. Vagueness: a problem for AI. (Course overview)
• HIT Summer School 2010, Harbin Institute of Technology, China. Generation of Referring Expressions: a crash course. (Course overview)

Research

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'. Other interests include the representation of ambiguity and vagueness. The former was the topic of the seminal collection "Semantic Ambiguity and Underspecification" (CSLI Publications 1996); the latter 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). 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 me in contact with neighbouring disciplines such as psycholinguistics and philosophical logic.

Projects (recent and ongoing)

• TUNA, on the generation of referring expressions, UK£220,000 from EPSRC. 2003-2007. Publications and background information can be found here.
• Affecting People with Natural Language (platform grant for Aberdeen Natural Language Generation group). UK£650,000 from EPSRC. 2007-2011.
• Co-investigator on COGENT, on Controlled Generation of Text. UK£210,000 from EPSRC. 2003-2007.
• NECA , which focusses on the generation of animated conversational agents. EUR 250,000 from the EU. 2001-2004.
• I've played a modest role in the ongoing development of Richard Power et al's WYSIWYM knowledge editing paradigm, focussing particularly on coreference and the authoring of multimedia documents. (See this page for information about WYSIWYM.)

Selected publications: I try to keep a complete listing in my extended CV . Publications after 2004 should be available from Aberdeen's departmental publications page (see under `external publications'). Here are some selected publications, organised by research topic (hence with some duplicates). Where possible, final or near-final versions of papers have been made downloadable.

• Vagueness and ambiguity

  (Van Deemter 1991) Coherence and the Logic of Ambiguity. In Proc. of 8th Amsterdam Colloquium, University of Amsterdam.

  (Van Deemter 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.
  

  (Van Deemter 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.
  

  (Van Deemter 1998) Ambiguity and Idiosyncratic Interpretation. Journal of Semantics Vol. 15 (1), 1998, pp.5-36.
  

  (Van Deemter 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.
  

  (Van Deemter 2006) Generating Referring Expressions that involve Gradable Properties. Computational Linguistics (32) 2, 2006.
  

  (Van Deemter 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.
  

  (Van Deemter 2009) Utility and language generation: the case of vagueness. Journal of Philosophical Logic 38 (6).
  

  (Van Deemter 2010) Vagueness Facilitates Search. To appear in Proceedings of the 2009 Amsterdam Colloquium, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). FoLLI LNAI.
  

• Anaphora

  (Van Deemter 1992) Towards a Generalization of Anaphora.
  Journal of Semantics 9, 1992, pp.27-51.
  

  (Krahmer and Van Deemter 1998) On the Interpretation of Anaphoric Noun Phrases: Towards a Full Understanding of Partial Matches.
  Journal of Semantics Vol. 15 (2), 1998, pp. 355-392.
  

• Natural Language Generation foundations and architectures:

  (Van Deemter and Odijk 1997) Context Modeling and the Generation of Spoken Discourse.
  Speech Communication 21 (1997) p. 101-121.
  

  (Van Deemter 2004) Towards a probabilistic version of bidirectional OT syntax and semantics.. Journal of Semantics, 21(3) August 2004.
  

  (Van Deemter, Krahmer, and Theune 2005) Real vs. template-based NLG: a false opposition? Computational Linguistics 31 (1), 2005.
  

  (Van Deemter 2009) What Game Theory can do for NLG: the case of vague language. Keynote paper, 12th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG-2009).
  

• Referring expressions and their generation:

  (Van Deemter 2000) Generating Vague Descriptions ,
  in Procs. of First International Conf. on Natural Language Generation (INLG-2000), Mitzpe Ramon.
  

  (Van Deemter and Kibble 2000) On Coreferring: Coreference in MUC and related annotation schemes.
  Computational Linguistics 26, No. 4, Dec. 2000.
  

  (Van Deemter and Halldorssson 2001) Logical Form Equivalence: the case of Referring Expressions Generation, in Procs. of 8th Europaean Workshop on Natural Language Generation (EWNLG2001), Toulouse.
  

  (Van Deemter 2002) Generating Referring Expressions: Boolean Extensions of the Incremental Algorithm. Computational Linguistics 28 (1) p.37-52.
  

  (Van Deemter 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.
  

  (Van Deemter 2006) Generating Referring Expressions that involve Gradable Properties. Computational Linguistics (32) 2, 2006.
  

  (Van Deemter and Krahmer 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.
  

  (Croitoru and Van Deemter 2007) A Conceptual Graph Approach to the Generation of Referring Expressions In Procs. of IJCAI-2007, Hyderabad, India.
  

  (Paraboni, Van Deemter, and Masthoff 2007) Generating Referring Expressions: Making Referents Easy to Identity. Computational Linguistics 33 (2).
  

  (Gatt and Van Deemter 2007) Lexical choice and conceptual perspective in the generation of plural referring expressions. Journal of Logic, Language and Information (JoLLI), 16(4): 423-443.
  

  (van Deemter and Gatt (2009) Beyond DICE: measuring the quality of a referring expression. In Procs. of COGSCI workshop ``Production of Referring Expressions'', Amsterdam, July 2009.
  

  (Ren, Van Deemter, and Pan 2010) Charting the potential of Description Logic for the Generation of Referring Expressions. In proc. INLG-2010, Trim, Ireland.
  

• Multimodality: pictures, speech and Embodied Conversational Agents:

  (Van Deemter 1993) What's New? A Semantic Perspective on Sentence Accent.
  Journal of Semantics 11, 1993, pp.1-31.
  

  (Van Deemter 1998) Towards a Blackboard Model of Accenting.
  Computer Speech and Language 12 (3), 1998.
  

  (Van Deemter 1999) Document Generation and Picture Retrieval .
  In Proc. of Third International Conference on Visual Information Systems (VISUAL99), Amsterdam, June 1999.
  

  (Van Deemter and Power 2003) ``High-Level Authoring of Illustrated Documents" . Natural Language Engineering 9 (2), June 2003.
  

  (Piwek, Power, Scott and Van Deemter 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.
  

  (Van Deemter, Krenn, Piwek, Schroeder, Klesen and Baumann 2008) Fully Generated Scripted Dialogue for Embodied Conversational Agents. Artificial Intelligence Journal Vol 172/10, pp. 1219-1244
  

Other interests

• Amnesty International's page.
• Photography

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Contact Details

Kees van Deemter
Computing Science
Meston Building
King's College
University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen AB24 3UE
Scotland, UK

Email: k.vdeemter atnospamplease abdn dot ac dot uk