Language and Computation Day

Week One, Friday, 3rd October 2008, all day - 4B.531

Details available from
http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/research/clgroup/Conferences/LangAndComp08/

Week 2

Friday, 10th October 2008, 2-4pm - 4B.531

Meeting held to decide timing and topics of LAC meetings during the Autumn Term.

Topic

We identified a number of workshops/sessions that might be of interest, and for each of them we have a volunteer who will study the program and select (and present) a paper that we will all read by next Friday.

• W1 Human Judgements in Computational Linguistics (Udo)
• W5 Knowledge and Reasoning for Question Answering (Chris)
• W6 Grammar Engineering Across Frameworks (Kakia)
• W7 2nd Information Retrieval for Question Answering Workshop (Richard)
• Main conference: Machine Translation sessions (Doug)

Link for COLING workshops: http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/harold.somers/coling/workshops.html

Timing

We could not find a slot which would suit all of us so we agreed on the following slot for now: Friday 13:00-15:00 (CS Seminar Room - the room is to be confirmed). We also identified a second slot: Thursday 11:00-13:00. We anticipate that this might be a better time in some weeks so that Dyaa and Lorna can attend as well.

Wiki

Chris agreed to look into wikis and to set up a simple one so that we will manage the reading group via a wiki rather than emails or a web page. Doug will liaise with Computing Services and talk to Chris.

Week 3

Friday, 17th October 2008, 1-3pm - 4B.531

Topic

We went over some topics and papers from the recent COLING conference, and identified three of interest (grammar parser, flat semantics for translation, evaluation of annotators):

• Klebanov, B et al. (2008). Analyzing Disagreements available at http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W08/W08-1202.pdf

• Rayner, M et al. (2008). Almost Flat Functional Semantics for Speech Translation available at http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/C/C08/C08-1090.pdf

• Santaholma, M. (2008). Multilingual Grammar Resources in multilingual Application Development available at http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W08/W08-1704.pdf

Kakia to present the Santaholma (2008) paper on Friday 24.10.2008 (see below for further info).

Wiki

Chris reported he had looked into various options for wikis, including in-house Microsoft software and external sites using open source wiki software. It was agreed we would initially go for a simple, externally visible wiki that supports latex markup for those that need it.

Week 4

Friday, 24th October 2008, 1-3pm - 4B.531

CoLing 2008

Kakia presented the Multilingual Grammar Resources in multilingual Application Development paper by M. Santaholma from the CoLing 2008 Workshop Session: "Grammar Engineering Across Frameworks" .

• Link to the Workshop: http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~thking/GEAF08/GEAF08.html
• Link to the paper: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W08/W08-1704.pdf
• Link to the the tool used to demonstrate the typology of Japanese, English, Finnish and Greek (World Atlas of Language Structure) : http://wals.info/

Week 5

Thursday 30th October, 10am-12pm - Room 5A.540

Research

Sonja put forward possible suggestions / directions for future reseach cooperation plans in the group.

Timing

For next week, we decided to meet on Thursday at 10am, as this time seemed to be the most convenient.

Week 6

Thursday 6th November 2008, 10am-12pm - Room 1.NW3.7 in the Network Centre

ACL 2008

Doug and Kakia looked at the ACL 2008 papers and identified trends and / or papers of possible interest to the group.

Wiki

Chris demonstrated how to use the wiki at the end of the meeting.

Here is the list of papers from ACL that people thought might be interesting.

As html on another site:
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~doug/fordoug/selectedACL08papers.html

As normal (wiki) text here: ACL 2008 papers

We agreed that people would have a look at this list and select a couple of papers that they might find interesting presenting/lead the discussion on. The table of people and the papers they are willing to present is currently near the top of this page.

Week 7

Friday, 14th November 2008, 1-3pm - 4B.531

Richard lead a discussion on Topic Indexing and Retrieval for Factoid QA by Kisuh Ahn and Bonnie Webber (http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W08/W08-1809.pdf), a paper from the IR4QA workshop at this year's COLING. The complete proceedings of the IR4QA workshop can found at http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W08/#1800.

Summary: This paper is about an interesting method for going through documents, finding person names etc and associating information with all those names before doing any question answering. It is thus an extension of Prager's Predictive Annotation and could be applicable to a variety of different tasks involving documents and the information they contain.

Week 8

Thursday, 20st November 2008, 10.30-12.00, CS Seminar Room (4B.531)

[ Meeting cancelled, topic moved to Week 9. ]

Week 9

Friday, 28th November 2008, 1-3pm, 4B.531

We went through some of the selected ACL papers that were identified in Week 6.

Kakia presented the P08-1002 paper by Bergsma, Lin and Goebel on Distributional Identification of Non-Referential Pronouns.

Jon presented the P08-2012 paper by Finkel and Manning on Enforcing Transitivity in Coreference Resolution.

Week 10

Friday 5th December 2008

Chris gave a talk outlining some of the things he has been working on during his study leave (deontic reasoning, and the analysis of obligations and permission). This is by way of a gentle introduction to slightly more technical discussions on various deontic puzzles and paradoxes, which may form the topic of a future LAC meeting.

Notes for the talk: http://chris.foxearth.org/deontic/LAC-talk.pdf
Suggested background reading: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-deontic/

We will continue with our informal review of ACL papers next week.

Week 11

12th December 2008

Deirdre and Richard presented the first of their papers selected from ACL 2008, as follows:

1. “Selecting Query Term Alterations for Web Search by Exploiting Query Contexts” by Guihong Cao, Stephen Robertson and Jian-Yun Nie, P08-1018 (Deirdre);
2. “Collecting a Why-Question Corpus for Development and Evaluation of an Automatic QA-System” by Joanna Mrozinski, Edward Whittaker, Sadaoki Furui, P08-1051 (Richard).

(Chris' paper was postponed till next term.)

Week 12

19th December 2008

No Meeting. (Resuming next term. Time and day of week to be decided.)

Week 16

23rd January 2009 — 10am, CSEE Seminar Room.

A short meeting to agree the timings and some topics for the rest of the term. (Have a peek at the suggestions page for Spring Term topics and relevant information on availability.)

Week 17

23rd January 2009 — 9am, CSEE Seminar Room.

Plagiarim Detection (Zdeněk)

Week 18

30th January 2009 — 9am, CSEE Seminar Room and 10am, Room 5N.3.7.

The provisional topic “The Good Samaritan” (Chris) was postponed.

Chris is chaired an alternative seminar, 10am—11am in 5N.3.7, to which all members of LAC were invited.

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The original topic is to be rescheduled for a later date.

Week 19

6th February 2009 — 9am, CSEE Seminar Room.

NLTK — toolkit presentation (Doug)

Week 20

13th February 2009 — 9am, CSEE Seminar Room.

Log analysis of UKsearch (Richard)

Week 21

20th February 2009 — 9am, CSEE Seminar Room.

Document Summarisation (Mahmoud), including a brief discussion of the problems facing Arabic NLP.

Week 22

27th February 2009 — 9am—10am, CSEE Seminar Room.

Deontic Wiki (Chris): a brief description of a Digital Library project funded by CSEE and the Philosophy Department, and some potential applications for NLP techniques.

Note that Chris is supposed to be elsewhere at 10.30.

Week 23

6th March 2009 — 9am—11am, CSEE Seminar Room.

The UIMA Frameowrk - presentation (Dyaa)

http://incubator.apache.org/uima/index.html

If there is time, this may be followed by a brief session on Mendeley for managing documents (Kakia) and possibly Foxit Reader (Jon). We were hoping to schedule this part in a lab. Unfortunately no CSEE labs are available at this time, so you may want to bring your laptop if you have one.

http://www.mendeley.com/
http://www.mendeley.com/faq/#what-is-mendeley
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/

Week 24

13th March 2009 — 9am—11am, CSEE Seminar Room.

This week we go back to discussing some of the selected ACL08 papers that were identified in Week 6.

Kakia presented paper P08-2008 by Dmitriy Dligach and Martha Palmer on Novel Semantic Features for Verb Sense Disambiguation.

Week 25

20th March 2009 — 9am—11am, CSEE Seminar Room.

Continuation of ACL08 selected papers.

1. “A Re-examination of Query Expansion Using Lexical Resources” by Hui Fang, P08-1017 (Deirdre);

Background Reading (Fang & Zhai):

1. “A Formal Study of Information Retrieval Heuristics”, sigir04-formal.pdf;
2. “An Exploration of Axiomatic Approaches to Information Retrieval”, sigir05-axiom.pdf;
3. “Semantic Term Matching in Axiomatic Approaches to Information Retrieval”, sigir06-expansion.pdf;

Week 30

24th April 2009 — 9am—11am, 5B.111A.
Please note the change in room for this event for the Summer Term

discussed programme for the coming term.

Week 31

1st May 2009 — 9am—11am, 5B.111A.

"The Good Samaritan and the Hygienic Cook." (Chris)

Version of a talk to be presented at Philosophy of Language and Linguistics (PhiLang2009)

[[collapsible show="» show abstract «" hide="» hide abstract »" folded="yes"]]
Preliminary Abstract: When developing formal theories of the meaning of language, it is appropriate to consider how apparent paradoxes and conundrums of language are best resolved. Unfortunately, given the complexity of language, it is not always entirely clear how to apportion the "blame" for our intuitions about a given example, and how the interpretation of language is best factored into different aspects of meaning. Furthermore, variations in the wording sometimes appear to give rise to very different intuitions. Perhaps it is variations in the behaviour of similar examples that may help give some clues as to the appropriate factorisation of the interpretation of language, and help us to refine our understanding of problematic phenomena.

In the case of Deontic Logic, which seeks to model reasoning with obligations and permissions, there are a range of familiar paradoxes, including the so-called Good Samaritan Paradox (Prior 1958), where we wish to avoid any implication that we ought to rob someone if we assent to the obligation to "help a robbed man". Such an obligation may be expressed by a sentence like the following.

(1) You must help a robbed man.

The fact that we do not normally take this to mean that we are obliged to rob someone leads to questions about the implicit scoping of the obligation operator with respect to modifier expressions (Castañeda 1981), or whether obligation distributes across conjunction, as in Standard Deontic Logic (e.g. McNamara 2006). In the literature, the intuitions about such examples is assumed to be clear and obvious, even if the means by which they are best captured is open to some debate.

The quality and nature of these intuitions might be undermined, or perhaps refined, if we consider examples of the same form, but with different words, such as

(2) You must use a clean knife.

In this case, we may be happy to conclude that there is an obligation to ensure the knife has been cleaned. But what then is the source of the intuition that there is no obligation to rob in (1)? Perhaps our intuitions about how such examples are best analysed is influenced by pre-existing moral assumptions and value judgements (e.g., that it is wrong to rob). If we fail to take this possibility into account, then our intuitions about specific examples may lead us astray when seeking universal rules governing deontic statements. If we are to take possibility into account, then the question remains as to how we are to do so. We could consider obligations as defeasible (Bonevac 1998, Makinson and van der Torre 2003). More specifically, we might attribute our intuitions to some defeasible generic interpretation (Carlson & Pelletier 1995). Alternatively, we might consider the different intuitions arising from some implicit focus on "help" in (1) and "clean" in (2).

This exemplifies the difficulty in attributing our intuitions about a particular example to a particular facet of language, and the need to look for examples that challenge our intuitions when formulating general principles.

Week 32

8th May 2009 — 9am—11am, 5B.111A.

Stephen to present the Autoadapt project.

Week 33

15th May 2009 — 9am—11am, 5B.111A.
No meeting.

Week 34

22nd May 2009 — 9am—11am, 5B.111A.
Kakia to present a brief report on the recent EACL 2009 Conference in Athens, Greece. slides
Deirdre to present a brief report on the recent ECIR 2009 Conference in Toulouse, France.
Slides

(Other conference reports and discussions of upcoming summer school and conference programmes also welcome.)

Week 35

29th May 2009 — 9am—11am, 5B.111A.
This week we will each present a 15-minute Summaries of EACL09 Papers.

Dyaa

DBpedia - A Linked Data Hub and Data Source for Web and Enterprise Applications, Georgi Kobilarov, Chris Bizer, S Aren Auer, Jens Lehmann, WWW2009 Developer's Track Proceedings.

A Brief Report on the Semantic Search Workshop at the WWW 2009 conference, Madrid, Spain.

Kakia

NLP and the humanities: the revival of an old liaison, Franciska de Jong summary slides

Week 36

5th June 2009 — 9am—11am, 5B.111A.

Doug

Learning Efficient Parsing, Gertjan van Noord

Stephen

Automatic Single-Document Key Fact Extraction from Newswire Articles, Itamar Kastner, Christof Monz