Seminar Series - Professor Kees van Deemter

Professor van Deemter from the University of Aberdeen (Computing Science) will give a talk titled "Current directions in research on reference production: making referents easy to find". Everyone is welcome.

Speaker: Prof Kees van Deemter - University of Aberdeen

Hosted by: Sandie Cleland

Venue: William Guild Room T1

In this talk, I will give an overview of attempts, in the last 20 years or so, to construct detailed algorithmic models of human language production, focussing on the production of referring expressions. Having summarised some of the main issues, trends and results in this area, I shall ask how good the resulting algorithms are at producing referring expressions that make it easy, for the recipient of the expression, to identify the target referent. I describe a series of experiments whose outcomes suggest that, particularly in complex situations, these algorithms are not good at this at all, and that a different approach, based on judicious over-specification, would make life much easier for the recipient. Implications for ongoing discussions on audience design will be discussed.

This line of work owes much to collaboration with Ivandre Paraboni and Judith Masthoff, and particularly to Ivandre's recent sabbatical from the University of Sao Paulo which he spent with us in Aberdeen.

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