Dan Chester's Research Interests and Expertise
Parsing Languages with Free Word Order
While many parsing strategies have been developed for parsing sentences
in languages like English and French, which have highly restricted word
order, new strategies are needed to efficiently parse the many languages
that allow considerable freedom in the order of words. We seek a
grammar formalism and parsing strategy that parses the constrained-word-order
and free-word-order aspects of languages such as Russian, Latin, Korean
and Walbiri with equal efficiency. Several approaches to identifying
dependencies between words are being investigated and applied to the
parsing of Esperanto, a highly inflected, agglutinative language, which
is over a hundred years old, has a large community of speakers,
and is probably the easiest free-word-order language to study.
Image Query System
This project explores knowledge representation issues in a context other than
robot arms. Workstations that can show photographic quality pictures are now
common. The image query system displays such pictures and then answers
questions about them. This ties together the problems of representing the
meanings of natural language with those of representing the information content
of images. (Think of this as a robot with disabilities; it can't move, but it
can communicate in natural language and it can see pictures, either stored in
files or live from a video camera.) While meaning representations of natural
language appear as sharp, symbolic expressions, the information content of
images is usually fuzzy, both because the image is fuzzy and because it is
often not clear where one object or event ends and another begins. The focus
of this project is on the mapping between the symbolic and image
representations.
Intelligent Advising Language System
This project attempts to tie together the natural language work by various
faculty and graduate students in the department into a coherent system that
takes natural language input and produces natural language output. My emphasis
in this project is on parsing natural language input into meaning
representations suitable for use by the modules written by the other natural
language researchers in the department. Since much of the natural language
work done here centers around the task of giving advice via a dialog with a
user in need, the resulting product will be an intelligent advising system. It
will provide a testbed vehicle for demonstrating and evaluating many of the
other natural langauge processing projects in the department.
last updated March 24, 2003
return to my homepage