research

I am working in the field of referring expression generation (REG), a subfield of Natural Language Generation. I work in a computing department, so I my approach to REG is mainly computational with a focus on producing a working system. But, I am also committed to uncovering and using psycholinguistic factors that have an influence on human language production and understanding.

	The main focus of my thesis work is on the use of spatial relations in referring expressions. I have collected a data set of descriptions of objects in simple 3D scenes, the GRE3D3 corpus to study how humans use spatial relations.
	I try to maintain an extensive bibliography on referring expression generation.
	To get a feel for existing referring expressions algorithms I conducted an initial experiment comparing their performance to a data set of human-produced descriptions.
	As a result of my first experiment, I got interested in the issues involved in evaluation of referring expression generation and NLG more general.
	I have done some work on an overgeneration and ranking approach to REG leveraging similarities between domains to be able to produce more than just one description for an object.
	In collabortion with Mariët Theune and Emiel Krahmer, I have done some work on optimising the use of redundancy in referring expressions.