10th Language and Computation DayCelebrating 10 years of excellence in research, teaching and social drinking

07th October 2011, R. 3.405

2001-2011 : key events in the science and IT history• 2001 Wikipedia is founded; publication of the human genome sequence• 2002 Online Marketing Optimisation; Creative Commons• 2003 MySpace & Skype founded; 1st Meeting of the World Summit of the Information

Society• 2004 Flickr & Facebook founded; image manipulation in scientific publications; Google

Print Project; Web 2.0• 2005 Google Earth launch; YouTube founded; Amazon Mechanical Turk; 7/7 London

bombings results in the adoption of user-generated content by mainstreat media (BBC)• 2006 Crowdsourcing; Twitter is founded; Wikileaks is founded• 2007 IBM begins development of the Watson QA system; First 1TB hard disk; iPhone;

Amazon Kindle; MacBook Aire• 2008 Android powered phone; Google Flu Trends; Europeana• 2009 Google Earth with historical imagery; Wolfram/Alpha; Bing; Google announces

real-time search; Google Goggles for Android• 2010 the Never-ending Language Learning system (NELL), Carnegie Mellon Uni; ipad;

Google Twitter replay; Google instant search• 2011 Google art Project; IBM’s Watson defeats humans @ Jeopardy

Past Seminars

2003/04 : The Acquisition of Lexical and Ontological Knowledge.

2004/05 : Language and Computation Seminar: Underspecification and Incrementality in Semantic Processing.

2005/06 : Empirical Methods in NLP.

2007/08 : NLP using Prolog and Perl (Nugues’ book)

2008/09 : We went through various papers in ACL 2008, and members presented details of their current research

2009/10 : R workshop

2010/11 : Probabilistic graphical Models and Bayesian Methods (Koller’s Book)

What is the Language and Computation Group?

• Interdisciplinary group of researchers from different departments (Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Language and Linguistics, UK Data Archive, Mathematics, Philosophy)

• Use computational methods to study language

• Staff and students

• New members welcome!

Who are we?

•School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering: Massimo Poesio, Udo Kruschwitz, Chris Fox, Maria Fasli, Jon Chamberlain, Dyaa Al-Bakour, Jenya Kovalchuk, Deirdre Lungley, Suma Adindla, Sharhida Saad, Mahmoud El-Haj, Richard Sutcliffe (Limerick)

•Language and Linguistics: Doug Arnold, Sonja Eisenbeiss, Louisa Sadler, Bob Borsley

•Data Archive: Lorna Balkan, Louise Corti, Kakia Chatsiou

•Mathematical Sciences: Olivia Sanchez-Graillet

... and more

Other

Mathematical sciences

SCSEE

UK Data Archive

LingLang

LAC group

Notable alumni members

• CSEE: Mijail Alexandrov-Kabadjov, Mohammed AL-Hadded, Abdulrahman Almuhareb, Hala Al-Bakour, Ron Artstein, Carolina Bailey, Stephen Dignum, Abduelbaset Goweder, Jeff Reynolds

• LingLang: Elina Andrikou, Maria Flouraki, Yasuhiro Kawata, Evita Linardaki, Voula Gotsoulia, Miriam Urgelles-Coll, Aline Villavincencio

What do we do?

• Research: a weekly research/reading seminar, annual flatlands meeting, annual Language and Computation Day

• Teaching: MA in Computational Linguistics, NLE course in CES

• Drinking: weekly pub nights, weekly lunch meetings

Research – notable past projects• Analyzing Free Text Segments of Emergency Service Reports (BAE Systems,

LingLang), 2009-2010

• Anawiki / Phrasedetectives

• Intelligent Mail Server (a KTP project with CSEE & AWS, Ipswich)

• Development of a career path framework (CSEE&Jobserve)

• Learning Disabilities Data and Information Infrastructure Project (ESRC)

• Markup-Based Knowledge Extraction Project (EPSRC)

• Anaphora Resolution and Underspecification (EPSRC)

• Essex Gateway to Arabic Resources (Essex)

Research Projects - ongoing

• CareerPath KTP project (JobServe Ltd., Essex), 2009-2011

• AutoAdapt: EPSRC project (Essex, RGU Aberdeen & Open University): Automatic Adaptation of Knowledge Structures for Assisted Information Seeking, 2008-2011

PhD students

• Suma Adindla Dialogue-driven intranet search • Sharhida Saad Web Usage Mining, adaptive Web sites• Mahmoud El-Haj Arabic text summarization• John Chamberlain• Deirdre Lungley• Dyaa Al-Bakour• Azhar Alhindi Text summarization• Antai Roseline Sentiment Analysis• Adindla Suma Intranet search

and others…

Events to come

• Search Solutions 2011

• TREC Session Track 2012

• European Conference in Information Retrieval 2012

• Any upcoming events?

Recent Publications

• Handbook of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (Chris)

• Experimenting with Automatic Text Summarization for Arabic (Mahmoud, Udo, Chris)

• An LFG analysis of Modern Greek Relative Clauses (Kakia)

• And others

Evening Dinner!