[Ltg] Combined HAIL/SALS-SIG Seminar (8th June): Professor Donia Scott, Information Technology Research Institute, UK

[Andrew Lampert]

Update: Note that this is a combined HAIL/SALS-SIG Seminar.


                      H.A.I.L. Seminar series
                          CSIRO ICT Centre
                   http://www.ict.csiro.au/HAIL/

                                AND

                              SALS-SIG
        Sydney Area Language and Speech Special Interest Group
            http://www.clt.mq.edu.au/Events/SALS-SIG.html


Title:          Layout in Language: the role of Document Structure

Speaker:        Professor Donia Scott
                Head of the Information Technology Research Institute
                University of Brighton
                United Kingdom

Date:           Tuesday 8th June 2004 at 11am

Location:       CSIRO Conference Room,
                Building E6B, Macquarie University.


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Abstract

This talk will present the case for abstract document structure as a separate descriptive level in the analysis and generation of written texts. The purpose of this representation is to mediate between the message of a text (i.e., its discourse structure) and its physical presentation (i.e., its organization into graphical constituents like sections, paragraphs, sentences, bulleted lists, figures, footnotes and so forth). Abstract document structure can be seen as an extension of Nunberg's `text-grammar'; it is also closely related to `logical' mark-up in languages like HTML and LaTeX. I will argue that by using this intermediate representation, several subtasks in language generation and language understanding can be defined more cleanly.


Short resume

Professor Donia Scott is the head of the Information Technology Research Institute at The University of Brighton. Her current research interests lie primarily in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing, especially Natural Language Generation and Discourse.

What makes a text coherent? What determines its level of comprehensibility?  These questions form the main thread of Donia's research interest. Since the early 1990s, Professor Scott has been exploring these issues in the context of natural language generation, particularly:

    - the structuring of discourse relations
    - the relationship between discourse and style
    - the determinants of pragmatic congruence in discourse

A related interest is multilingual natural language generation, which provides a potentially rich environment to explore some of these issues.


----------------------------------------
The HAIL Seminars' URL:
http://www.ict.csiro.au/HAIL/

Contacts:       Andrew Lampert
Address:        CSIRO HAIL Seminars,
                c/o Andrew Lampert,
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Phone:  (02) 9325 3100
Email:  Andrew.Lampert at csiro.au



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