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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The tutorial goal is to help the participants to orient themselves in the existing work on Information Structure (IS) and to inspire them to apply it. We will explain the basic notions used by selected main approaches, show examples of employing IS to generate contextually appropriate natural language text and/or dialogue system output, and sketch future challenges.
IS concerns structural and semantic properties of utterances reflecting their communicative intentions in relation to discourse context. Various dichotomies are used to describe IS, e.g. Theme-Rheme, Topic-Comment/Focus, Background-Focus/Kontrast, Given-New and Contextually Bound-Nonbound. The proliferating and often under-formalized terminologies are one reason why it is difficult to orient in the existing formal and computational work on IS, and to advance the study. Among the means to realize IS in many languages are word order, intonation and marked syntactic constructions, although languages differ in how they employ them. Modelling these phenomena and their interaction in the grammar requires understanding IS and its role in discourse. IS is therefore an important aspect of meaning that computational models of discourse processing should take into account.
Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová obtained her first degree in 1992 in Informatics at the Faculty of Electrotechnical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic. In 1998 she obtained the doctor title in mathematical linguistics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, for a PhD Thesis entitled "The Dynamic Potential of Topic and Focus: A Praguian Approach to Discourse Representation Theory". Subsequently she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, U.K. Since April 2001 she has been employed as a researcher at the Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.
Kruijff-Korbayová has published several journal articles and
book chapters, and numerous peer-reviewed papers at international
conferences and workshops. She has received several individual study
and research grants, and has been involved in several national and
international research projects concerned, e.g., with text generation
and dialogue systems. She has also served on the program committees
of and/or organized numerous international events. She is currently a
member of the Standing Committee of the European Summer School of
Logic, Language and Information (since 2004), and an elected
information officer of the ACL-SIGSEM Special Interest Group in
Computational Semantics (since 1999).
ACL/HCSNet Advanced Program in Natural Language Processing