[Ltg] SALS-SIG Seminar Reminder [Donia Scott, June 8]

[Stephen.Wan at csiro.au]

*** Please note the change of venue ***

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Joint SALS-SIG / HAIL Seminar
 - see: http://www.clt.mq.edu.au/Events/SALS-SIG.html
 - see also: http://www.ict.csiro.au/HAIL/

Tuesday, June 8, 2004 at 11am

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

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.

Bio:

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.