Faculty Profile

Daniel Chester

Associate Professor
101G Smith Hall
Newark, Delaware 19716
P: 302-831-1955
chester@udel.edu

Personal Website

EDUCATION

Ph.D | Mathematics from University of California at Berkeley
M.A. | Mathematics from University of California at Berkeley
B.A. | Mathematics from University of California at Berkeley

SHORT BIO

The focus of my research is knowledge representation. Much of the work in artificial intelligence involves encoding a problem in some representation, solving the problem and presenting the solution in some representation. The representations for input, output and intermediate calculations are interpreted by humans, however, and that interpretation is their sole source of meaning. Unfortunately, the interpretation is done informally; it seldom has the formal semantics behind it that the interpretation of logical or mathematical formulas has. My goal is to develop knowledge representations, especially for the intermediate calculations, that derive their meaning in a more rigorous way than is usually done, and that depend less on human interpretation to have meaning.

RESEARCH AREAS

• AI/NLP/Info. Retrieval/Data Mining

SELECT PUBLICATIONS

1. “Extending Document Summarization to Information Graphics” (with Sandra Carberry, Stephanie Elzer, Nancy Green, and Kathleen McCoy). Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Text Summarization, July 25-26, 2004.
2. “Understanding Information Graphics: A Discourse-Level Problem” (with Sandra Carberry, Stephanie Elzer, Nancy Green, and Kathleen McCoy). Proceedings of the Fourth SIGDial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Association for Computational Linguistics, July 5-6, 2003, 1-12.
3. “Multi-Modal Direction of a Robot by Individuals with a Significant Disability” (with Shoupu Chen, Zunaid Kazi, and Richard Foulds). Fourth International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics, Wilmington, Delaware, 1994, 55-64.
4. “A Formal Basis For Analogical Reasoning” (with Charles Dierbach). In: Allen, J. A., Fikes, R., and Sandewall, E. (eds.) Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Proceedings of the Second International Conference, April, 1991. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., San Mateo, CA, 1991.
5. “Experience in the Development of an Expert System for Fault Diagnosis in a Commercial Scale Chemical Process” (with P. Dhurjati and D. Lamb). Proceedings of the First International Conference on Foundations of Computer-Aided Process Operations, Park City, Utah, G. V. Reklaitis and H. D. Spriggs, eds., CACHE-Elsevier Science Publishers, New York, New York, July 5-10, 1987, 589-625.
6. “Towards a natural language semantics formalized in terms of physical symbol systems.” In Stephanie Williams, ed., Humans and Machines, Ablex Publishing Corporation, Norwood, New Jersey, 1985, 54-66.
7. “A parsing algorithm that extends phrases.” American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Vol. 6, No. 2, April-June 1980, 87-96.