AIC Seminar Series

To produce documents in multiple languages automatically requires a language-independent representation of the documents' meaning. For a person to build this language-independent representation by communicating in natural language with a computer system, the problem of reference must be addressed. This problem, inherent in natural language, presents itself not only in the specification of the language-independent representation, but also in the generation of documents with the meaning contained in this representation. This talk presents methods to make both the specification of entities in the user interface and the generation of expressions to refer to these entities in documents more natural and provides empirical evidence demonstrating the efficacy of these methods.

Jill Nickerson is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Harvard University, completing her degree in June 2005. Her thesis is entitled Reference Specification in Multilingual Document Production. Her research interests are in natural-language processing, specifically in human-computer interaction, spoken dialogue systems, and natural-language generation. Jill received her undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. More information about her work is available at http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~nickerso.

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