About the Group
The most convenient way for humans to interact with intelligent systems is usually via language. To communicate naturally with their users, computer systems need to be equipped with the means to efficiently process language and extract meaning from it. However, computing the meaning of an utterance is a complex task, which involves various linguistic levels: the lexical meaning of individual words, the semantic argument structure of clauses and sentences (who did what to whom?), the discourse context (how does a sentence relate to its neighbouring sentences?), and finally the situational context (who is speaking/listening?; what does the speaker want to achieve by making the utterance?). We aim to address this task by developing robust and flexible models of discourse meaning which are able to draw on various information sources to determine the most likely interpretation given the context.
Research topics we are currently working on include:
- discourse aware models for shallow semantic parsing
- statistical discourse analysis
- computational modelling of non-literal language
- natural language processing for less-studied languages
- language technology for cultural heritage data
The junior research group was established in September 2008 and is funded by Saarland University's Cluster of Excellence on "Multimodal Computing and Interaction (MMCI)".
People
Current Members- Caroline Sporleder (head)
- Alexis Palmer (PostDoc)
- Ashutosh Modi (PhD student, joint supervision with Ivan Titov)
- Philip John Gorinski (student assistant)
- Linlin Li (PhD student, now at Microsoft, Oslo, Norway)
- Cécile Grivaz (visiting researcher)
- Xaver Koch (student assistant)
- Todd Shore (student assistant)
Research Students (current and former)
- Joo-Eun Feit
Master's thesis (The Semantic Argument Structure of Idiomatic Expressions, ongoing) - Chenhua Chen
Master's thesis (Active Learning for Semantic Role Labelling, defended summer 2011) - Yevgeni Berzak
Master's thesis ("Sense-driven Paraphrase Acquisition for Idiomatic Expressions", defended October 2010) - Phillip Kellner
Bachelor's thesis ("Adapting the Yarowsky Algorithm for Frame Assignment", defended September 2010) - Masood Ghayoomi
Master's thesis ("Frame Assignment with Active Learning", defended September 2009) - Torsten Marek
Master's thesis ("Integration of Light-Weight Semantics into a Syntax Query Formalism", defended February 2009)