Computing Science department
University of Aberdeen
I am an academic working in Computational Linguistics, the area of Artificial Intelligence where Computer Science meets Linguistics. My main expertise is in Computational Semantics and especially Natural Language Generation. I take a lively interest in logical and philosophical issues arising in these areas. More recently I've started to work closely with psycholinguists interested in algorithmic models of language production.
Brief CV (Extended version, last updated 3 May 2012)
My research centers around the question how information can be expressed in a way that is suitable for human recipients. Examples include the use of computers for generating text from the numbers or formulas in a knowledge base, and the design of Embodied Conversational Agents. One of my main research interests is the generation of referring expressions, as when we program a computer to refer to 'your last email to University Registry', to 'the icon at the top-left of your screen', or 'the moment when it started to rain'. I am particularly intrigued by situations where language use appears to be flawed, as when we use expressions that are ambiguous or vague. Ambiguity was the topic of the seminal collection "Semantic Ambiguity and Underspecification" (review). Vagueness is the focus of my recent book "Not Exactly: in Praise of Vagueness". See the web site of the book for reviews and other material. In my research, I try to bridge the gap that sometimes exists between theoretical and applied work, solving practical problems in a theoretically sound way (on a good day!) and using concrete algorithms to address theoretical problems. This often brings me in contact with neighbouring disciplines such as psycholinguistics and mathematical logic.
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(2003-2007) Co-I on COGENT, on Controlled Generation of Text. £210,000 from EPSRC.
(2003-2007) PI on the TUNA project, on the generation of referring expressions, £220,000 from EPSRC.
(2007-2012) Co-I on the project "Affecting People with Natural Language". Platform Grant supporting Aberdeen's Natural Language Generation group. £650,000 from EPSRC.
(2011-2012) PI, with Fernandez and Barr, on the project "Common Ground and the Granularity of Referring Expressions". £4,000 from ESF XPRAG, a Research Networking programme of the European Science Foundation.
(2012-2015) In February 2012, the EPSRC informed us that the (approx) £1,000,000 research project Scrutable Autonomous Systems will be funded. The project will use Argumentation Theory and Natural Language Generation to clarify the content of computer-generated plans. In NLG terms this means mapping logical expressions to English sentences. (PI: Vasconcelos; Co-I's: Masthoff, Oren, van Deemter.)
(2012-2015) In March 2012, the EPSRC informed us that the (approx) £130,000 research network RefNet will be funded. RefNet will bring computational linguists, psycholinguists and people working on intelligent interfaces together around the theme of reference. (PIs: van Deemter and Bard.)
(Van Deemter 1995)
The Sorites Fallacy and the Context-dependence of Vague Predicates.
In Kanazawa, Pinon and de Swart (eds.), "Quantifiers,
Deduction, and Context". CSLI Publications, Stanford, Ca.,
pp.59-86.
(Van Deemter 1995)
Towards a Logic of Ambiguous Expressions.
In Van Deemter and Peters (eds.) "Semantic Ambiguity
and Underspecification", pp.203-237.
CSLI Publications, Stanford, Ca.
To buy the entire collection of papers, go
here. Here is a review.
(Van Deemter 1998)
Ambiguity and Idiosyncratic Interpretation.
Journal of Semantics Vol. 15 (1), 1998, pp.5-36.
(Van Deemter 2004)
Finetuning an NLG system through experiments with human
subjects: the case of vague descriptions. In Procs. of 3rd International
Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG-04),
Brockenhurst, UK.
(Van Deemter 2006)
Generating Referring Expressions that involve Gradable
Properties. Computational Linguistics (32) 2,
2006.
(Van Deemter 2009) What Game Theory can do for NLG: the case of vague language.
Keynote paper, 12th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG-2009), Athens, Greece.
(Van Deemter 2009)
Utility and language generation: the case of vagueness.
Journal of Philosophical Logic 38 (6).
(Van Deemter 2010)
Vagueness Facilitates Search.
In Proceedings of the 2009 Amsterdam Colloquium, Springer Lecture
Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). FoLLI LNAI 6042.
(Van Deemter 2011) The Two Cultures of Logic. To appear in R.Seising, E.Trillas, C.Moraga and S.Termini (eds.): On Fuzziness. A Homage to Lotfi A. Zadeh (Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing Vol. 216), Berlin, New York: Springer 2012.
(Van Deemter 1990) Forward References in Natural Language.
Journal of Semantics 7, 1990, pp.281-300. A different route to the same paper can be found here.
(Van Deemter 1992) Towards a Generalization of Anaphora.
Journal of Semantics 9, 1992, pp.27-51. A different route to the same paper can be found here.
(Krahmer and Van Deemter 1998)
On the Interpretation of Anaphoric Noun Phrases:
Towards a Full Understanding of Partial Matches.
Journal of Semantics Vol. 15 (2), 1998, pp. 355-392.
(Van Deemter and Odijk 1997)
Context Modeling and the Generation of Spoken Discourse.
Speech Communication 21 (1997) p. 101-121.
(Van Deemter 2004)
Towards a probabilistic version of bidirectional
OT syntax and semantics..
Journal of Semantics, 21(3) August 2004.
(Van Deemter, Krahmer, and Theune 2005)
Real vs. template-based NLG: a false opposition?
Computational Linguistics 31 (1), 2005.
(Van Deemter 2009)
What Game Theory can do for NLG: the case of vague language.
Keynote paper, 12th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG-2009).
(Van Deemter and Kibble 2000)
On Coreferring: Coreference in MUC and related annotation schemes.
Computational Linguistics 26, No. 4, Dec. 2000.
(Van Deemter and Halldorssson 2001)
Logical Form Equivalence: the case of Referring Expressions Generation,
in Procs. of 8th Europaean Workshop on Natural Language Generation (EWNLG2001),
Toulouse.
(Van Deemter 2002)
Generating Referring Expressions:
Boolean Extensions of the Incremental Algorithm.
Computational Linguistics 28 (1) p.37-52.
(Van Deemter 2004)
Finetuning an NLG system through experiments with human
subjects: the case of vague descriptions. In Procs. of 3rd International
Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG-04),
Brockenhurst, UK.
(Van Deemter 2006)
Generating Referring Expressions that involve Gradable
Properties. Computational Linguistics (32) 2,
2006.
(Van Deemter and Krahmer 2006)
Graphs and Booleans: on the
generation of referring expressions In
H.Bunt and R.Muskens (Eds.) ``Computing
Meaning, Volume 3", Studies in Linguistics and
Philosophy, Kluwer, Dordrecht.
(Croitoru and Van Deemter 2007)
A Conceptual Graph Approach to the Generation of
Referring Expressions In Procs. of
IJCAI-2007, Hyderabad, India.
(Paraboni, Van Deemter, and Masthoff 2007)
Generating Referring Expressions:
Making Referents Easy to Identity.
Computational Linguistics 33 (2).
(Gatt and Van Deemter 2007)
Lexical choice and conceptual perspective in the generation of plural referring expressions.
Journal of Logic, Language and Information (JoLLI), 16(4): 423-443.
(van Deemter and Gatt (2009) Beyond DICE:
measuring the quality of a referring expression. In Procs. of COGSCI workshop ``Production of Referring Expressions'', Amsterdam, July 2009.
(Ren, Van Deemter, and Pan 2010) Charting the potential of Description Logic for the Generation of Referring Expressions.
In proc. INLG-2010, Trim, Ireland.
(Krahmer and van Deemter 2012)
Computational Generation
of Referring Expressions: A Survey. Computational Linguistics 38 (1), March 2012, pp.173-218.
(Khan, van Deemter and Ritchie 2012)
Managing ambiguity in reference generation: the role of surface structure.
Topics in Cognitive Science 4(2), pp.211-231.
(Van Deemter, Gatt, van Gompel and Krahmer 2012)
Towards a computational psycholinguistics of reference production.
Topics in Cognitive Science 4(2), pp.166-183.
(Van Deemter, Gatt, van der Sluis and Power, to appear)
Generation of referring expressions: assessing the incremental algorithm.
To appear in Cognitive Science , 2012.
(Van Deemter, Gatt, van der Sluis and Power, to appear) Assessing the Incremental Algorithm: a Response to Krahmer et al. Letter to the Editor, to appear in Cognitive Science, 2012.
(Van Deemter 1994) What's New? A Semantic Perspective on Sentence Accent.
Journal of Semantics 11, 1994, pp.1-31. A different route to the same paper can be found here.
(Van Deemter 1998)
Towards a Blackboard Model of Accenting.
Computer Speech and Language 12 (3), 1998.
(Van Deemter 1999)
Document Generation and Picture Retrieval .
In Proc. of Third International Conference on Visual
Information Systems (VISUAL99), Amsterdam, June 1999.
(Van Deemter and Power 2003)
High-Level Authoring of Illustrated Documents .
Natural Language Engineering 9 (2), June 2003.
(Piwek, Power, Scott and Van Deemter 2005)
Generating Multimedia Presentations: from Plain Text to Screenplay.
In O. Stock and M. Zancanara (Eds.) Intelligent
Multimodal Information Presentation, Vol.27.
Kluwer Publishing, Dordrecht.
(Van Deemter, Krenn, Piwek, Schroeder, Klesen and Baumann 2008) Fully Generated
Scripted Dialogue for Embodied Conversational Agents.
Artificial Intelligence Journal Vol 172/10, pp. 1219-1244
DOI: 10.1162/COLI_a_00088. See also here .
DOI: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2011.01167.x. Members of the Cognitive Science Society may download a
copy from here.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2012.01187.x. Members of the Cognitive Science Society may download a
copy from here.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01205.x. Members of the Cognitive Science Society may download a copy from here .
DOI: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2012.01259.x.