Natural Language Processing
Overview
The Natural Language Processing group performs basic and applied research on every level of language. One main strand of both our basic and our applied research is figurative language. Another strand is assertion evaluation, concerning the modelling and emulation of the human ability to acquire knowledge through testimony. Our applied research also includes Information Retrieval and probabilistic analysis of text, the latter leading for instance to a tool for unsupervised topic-wise clustering of large document collections.
In our research is the understanding of figurative language (metaphor, etc.) in everyday contexts, the ATT-Meta project has, in its general theory and its implemented system, introduced unprecedented flexibility into metaphor processing through a revised view of the nature of metaphorical mappings, use of default reasoning, and thorough integration of mappings into reasoning. The e-drama project has prototyped algorithms for real-time affective-metaphor processing in automated conversational agents in virtual role-play (as part of a collaboration with BT and two local SMEs: Hi8us Midlands and Maverick TV).
One strategic ambition is to establish metaphor as a new, important, practical focus within research communities concerned with human language technology, such as textual entailment, document summarisation and affect analysis.
If you wish to contact a particular member of the group, please use the links below to go to that person's page. If you do not know whom to contact, then by default you should contact
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Dr Mark Lee
School of Computer Science University of Birmingham England B15 2TT M.G.Lee@cs.bham.ac.uk http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mgl/ +44 (0)121 414 4765 |
Group members
| Academic Staff | Research Fellows/Associates |
|
Prof. John Barnden Dr Peter Coxhead Dr Antoni Diller Dr William Edmondson Dr Peter Hancox Dr Ata Kaban Dr Mark Lee |
Dr. Rodrigo Agerri Dr Alan Wallington |
| Research Students + Visitors | Previous Members |
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David Brooks Ismail Bhula Chris Creed Aleem Hossain Nursham Samsudin |
Kirsty Crombie Smith Dr Helen Gaylard Dr Sheila Glasbey Dr Jon Iles Dr Dorota Iskra Dr Elliot Smith Dr Xin Wang Dr Jeff Wen Dr Dan Winchester Dr Sylvia Wong Dr Li Jane Zhang |
Completed PhD Theses
These are theses completed by members of the Natural Language Processing Group under the supervision of current members.
| Student | David Brooks |
| Title | Unsupervised Natural Language Syntax Induction from Corpora |
| Date | 2007 |
| Supervisor | Dr Mark Lee |
| Abstract | |
| Full text | |
| Student | Xin Wang |
| Title | Observation Saliency Estimation Using Latent Variable Models in the Context of Data Clustering |
| Date | 2007 |
| Supervisor | Dr Ata Kaban |
| Abstract | |
| Student | Daniel Winchester |
| Title | Cross-document coreference and proper names |
| Date | 2005 |
| Supervisor | Dr Mark Lee |
| Abstract | |
| Student | Li Jane Zhang |
| Title | A syllable-based, pseudo-articulatory approach to speech recognition |
| Date | 2004 |
| Supervisor | Dr William Edmondson |
| Abstract | |
| Full text | |
| Student | Dorota Iskra |
| Title | Feature-based approach to speech recognition |
| Date | 2000 |
| Supervisor | Dr William Edmondson |
| Abstract | |
| Student | Elliot Smith |
| Title | Incoherence and text comprehension: cognitive and computational models of inferential control |
| Date | 2000 |
| Supervisor | Dr Peter Hancox |
| Abstract | |
| Full text | |
| Student | Sylvia Wong |
| Title | An investigation into the use of argument structure and lexical mapping theory for machine translation |
| Date | 1999 |
| Supervisor | Dr Peter Hancox |
| Abstract | |
| Full text | |
| Student | Helen Gaylard |
| Title | Phrase structure in a computational model of child language acquisition |
| Date | 1995 |
| Supervisor | Dr Peter Hancox |
| Abstract | |
| Full text | |
| Student | Jon Iles |
| Title | Text-to-speech conversion using feature-based formant synthesis in a non-linear framework |
| Date | 1995 |
| Supervisor | Dr William Edmondson |
| Abstract | |