[Ltg] LTG Seminar [Rolf Schwitter, Menno van Zannen 07-05-14, E6A 357, 11am]

[Marc Tilbrook]

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 LTG Seminar
  - see: http://www.clt.mq.edu.au/Events/Seminars.html

  Monday, 14th May, 2007, 11am
  Macquarie University, E6A, Room 357
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This week we will have 2 30 minute talks from Rolf Schwitter and Menno van
Zannen

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Title: Web-Annotations for Humans and Machines
Speaker: Rolf Schwitter

We propose to manually annotate web pages with computer-processable
controlled natural language. These annotations have well-defined formal
properties and can be used as query relevant summaries to automatically
answer questions expressed in controlled natural language, and as the basis
for other forms of automated reasoning. Last, but not least, the annotations
can also serve as human-readable summaries of the contents of the web pages.
Arguably, annotations written in controlled natural language can bridge the
gap between informal and formal notations and leverage true collaboration
between humans and machines. This is a position paper that proposes a
solution combining existing methods and techniques to achieve a highly
relevant practical goal, namely how to effectively access information on the
web. However, our solution introduces a "chicken and egg" problem: a
critical mass of web annotations will be necessary that people perceive the
value of these annotations and start annotating web pages themselves. Only
the future will show whether this - basically non-technical - problem can be
solved.


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Title: Complex search and some other problems
Speaker: Menno van Zannen

In this talk, I will briefly present what I have been working on lately.

AnswerFinder, our own question answering system, was originally developed to
answer English questions by searching for answers in relevant English
documents.  This is done by analysing shallow semantic representations of
both question and sentences (from the documents).

Recently, I have expanded the functionality so AnswerFinder can also be used
for multi-lingual question answering.  At the moment, a pilot version of MAF
(Multi-lingual AnswerFinder) is busy answering Dutch questions by finding
answers in English.

I will discuss some of the problems I encountered and I will finish with
another complex search topic that I used to work on and that I may want to
think about some more in the future.