A Selected Tour of NLP in the British Isles

Diane Litman

Leverhulme Visiting Professor

University of Edinburgh

August 2007 - July 2008

The University of Edinburgh School of Informatics (AI, CogSci, CL, CS)

– Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems» Directors: Johana Moore

(and Steedman)

» Faculty: Goldwater, Keller, Klein, Koehn, Lapata, Lascarides, Lavrenko, Oberlander, Osborne, Renals, Thompson, Webber

» Researchers, Visitors, etc.

– Centre for Intelligent Systems and Their Applications– Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation– Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science– Even More!

From Flat …

…to Forum

The University of York (Oct) Suresh Manandhar Alan Frisch, Daniel Kudenko

Multi-agent systems Machine learning Constraint programming Natural language processing Games and interactive drama

University of Edinburgh Talks Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems/

Human Communication Research Centre Seminar (Nov)– Mihai

Dialogue Systems group (Dec)– Hua

Interdisciplinary Tea (Jan)– Art

Distinguished Lecture Series (Feb)

Oxford University (Nov) Computational Linguistics

– Stephen Pulman

Sample Projects– Accurate and Efficient Parsing of Biomedical Text– COMPANIONS– Verb-initial grammars: A multilingual/parallel perspectiv

Knowledge Representation

The University of Sheffield (Nov)

Marilyn Walker

Mark Stevenson (no photo)

Yorick Wilks (mainly at Oxford)

Rob Gaizauskas

…

NL Analysis (IE and Dialogue), Architectures for NLP, NL Generation and NLP Resources and Tools.

University of Aberdeen (Dec) Natural Language Generation Group

– Affecting People with Natural Language– The Joking Computer– Generating Textual Summaries of Clinical Temporal

The Open University (Jan) Natural Language Generation Group

– Document Structure– Conversational Agents– Politeness and bias in Dialogue Summarization– Report Generation

Donia Scott, Richard Power, Paul Piwek,

Sandra Williams, Clara Mancini

Dublin City University (Feb) CNGL (Centre for Next Generation Localisation)

– “Our work is guided by the vision of enabling people to interact with content, products and services in their own language, according to their own culture, and according to their own personal needs.”

– machine translation, speech, etc.– $$$$ (NAACL gold sponsor)

Josef Van Genabith, Director Other Dublin universities

Cambridge University (Feb) NLIP (Natural Language and Information

Processing) Group – Simone Teufel– Ann Copestake– Stephen Clark (moved from Oxford)– Ted Briscoe– (Karen Sparck Jones)

Steve Young (Engineering)– speech and dialogue

University of Ulster (Apr) Michael McTear

And many more I didn’t get to! Manchester London Brighton Sussex Birmingham …