Running Projects

From SIGSEM

NOTE: If you know a project concerned with computational semantics that you'd like to be included in this list, please send an e-mail with the project's name, URL, brief description and life-span to .

• Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition: Computational Theory and Educational Curriculum
  Aim/Scope: We are developing algorithms that learn word meanings from context & background knowledge, & using the algorithms to teach "deliberate" (i.e., non-incidental) CVA strategies to students. Observations from case studies of students using CVA feeds back into further development of our computational theory.
  Life-span: Ongoing since 2001
  (Entry by William J. Rapaport)
• Chorus (Semantic Processing with Concurrent Constraints)
  Aim/Scope: When interpreting utterances, people often prefer a particular reading among all the possible ones. This gives them additional information by which to resolve any remaining underspecfication. But preference may lead to wrong conclusions which have to be revised later on. Systems for natural language processing, too, have to be prepared to cope with this kind of imperfect input. Therefore the goal of the CHORUS project is to model this ability of human beings on a computer by modelling linguistic processing with preferences and constraints.
  Life-span: Ongoing since 1999.
  (Entry by Johan Bos)
  
• Deriving General World Knowledge from Texts and Taxonomies
  Aim/Scope: We think that NL texts contain general world knowledge at a level beneath the level of what is explicitly asserted. We are using rules of interpretation and abstraction to derive such knowledge (at first, from Treebank corpora). We are also assessing WordNet taxonomies as sources of logicaly interpretable assertions.
  Life-span: Ongoing since 2000.
  (Entry by Len Schubert)
  
• Episodic Logic and EPILOG
  Aim/Scope: Episodic Logic is a very expressive NL-like situational logic intended as a natural target logic for NL interpretation and commonsense inference. EPILOG is the inference engine for Episodic Logic, developed over many years, partly with support from Boeing Co. It has been tested in several domains.
  Life-span: Ongoing since ca. 1988.
  (Entry by Len Schubert)
  
• InDiGen (Integrated Discourse Generation)
  Aim/Scope: Development of an integrated approach to discourse and sentence planning which captures the interaction of discourse marker selection, ellipsis, and discourse structure.
  Life-span: Ongoing, since 2000.
  (Entry by Ivana Kruijff-Korbayov·)
  
• The NewsTools Project
  Aim/Scope: An umbrella for various funded projects and collaborations. It is aimed at developing tools for analysing and merging news reports that are represented in the form of structured text. The tools being developed in the NewsTools Project are for the following tasks; [1] Merging multiple news reports from heterogeneous sources and collected over time. [2] Handling inconsistency in news reports; and [3] Reasoning with news reports. These tools are being developed using logic-based knowledge representation and reasoning techniques. These techniques allow for a formal specification of the functionality of the tools, and also support a viable approach to managing the necessary domain knowledge required for the tool functionality.
  Life-span: Ongoing since 2001
  (Entry by Tony Hunter)
  
• SIRIDUS (Specification, Interaction and Reconfiguration in Dialogue Understanding Systems)
  Aim/Scope: Expanding our understanding of and develop computational tools to support the development of more robust, functional and user-friendly dialogue systems. A follow-up of TRINDI (see below)
  Life-span: 2000-2002
  (Entry by Ivana Kruijff-Korbayov·)
  
• Type-Logical Grammar with Web-Based Parser
  Aim/Scope: Provide widest coverage computational grammar for English in Montagovian tradition with online implementation in Prolog. Covers coordination (right-node raising and "unlike" categories), quantifiers, reflexives and reciprocals, frequency adverbs, plurals (group/mass), determiners and partitives, control (intensional subjects, auxiliaries) unbounded dependencies (clefting, pied-piping), and islands/locality.
  Life-span: Ongoing. Parser completed 1999-2000.
  (Entry by Bob Carpenter)