Natural Language Processing
University of Melbourne, 10-14 July 2006
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Natural Language Processing University of Melbourne, 10-14 July 2006 |
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I will introduce the concept of lexical chains and its applications in NLP, and explain the underlying intuitions of semantic distance and similarity that are involved in the creation of chains. I will then discuss various ways of making these ideas formal, using lexicographic resources such as thesauri, dictionaries, and, most importantly, WordNet. Methods covered will include those based on network paths and those based on information content. In addition, I'll look at methods that integrate distributional methods with those based on lexicographic resources, and say a little about the limitations of distributional methods.
Graeme Hirst (PhD, Brown University, 1983) is a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, specializing in computational linguistics and natural language processing. Hirst's research has covered a broad but integrated range of topics in computational linguistics, natural language understanding, and related areas of cognitive science. These include the resolution of ambiguity in language understanding; the preservation of author's style in machine translation; recovering from misunderstanding and non-understanding in human-computer communication; and linguistic constraints on knowledge-representation systems. His present research includes the problem of near-synonymy in lexical choice in language generation; computer assistance for collaborative writing; and applications of semantic distance in intelligent spelling checkers.
Hirst is a member of the editorial boards of Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics, and has been book review editor of the latter since 1985. He is the author of two monographs: Anaphora in Natural Language Understanding (Springer-Verlag, 1981) and Semantic Interpretation and the Resolution of Ambiguity (Cambridge University Press, 1987). He is the recipient of two awards for excellence in teaching. He has supervised post-graduate students in more than 35 theses and dissertations, four of which have been published as books.