SGES Evening Lectures
Birkbeck College University of London
The Evening Lectures are free to both members and non-members of
SGES.
Further information is vailable on the SGES website:
http://www.bcs-sges.org
Wednesday 17th March 1999 (6 pm)
Prof. Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield)
Information Retrieval, Extraction and Summarisation
ABSTRACT
The talk distinguishes information detection or retrieval (IR) from
information extraction (IE) and describes recent advances in using IE
technology for fast access to very large amounts of textual
information in, for example, the world wide web and its extraction to
a browsable database. This technology is now becoming available
commercially and I describe a number of Language Engineering projects
incorporating IE technology. It is argued that multilingual
applications in IE/IR make the distinction between these information
processing technologies and machine translation and automatic question
answering and summarisation less clear than before, and they can now
be combined in original ways to optimise information access via
electronic text. Promising applications are mentioned in security,
publishing, communications, finance, science, patents etc. The
problems in advancing the field rapidly are described, particularly an
appropriate interface, the modelling of the users needs and automatic
adaptation of such systems to new domains. Summarisation used to be a
traditional linguistic task, tackled by a range of techniques, but is
now seen almost exclusively as a by-product of IR or IE technology,
creating a text from the set of sentences containing the most
improbable terms or by generating text from the content of IE
templates.
YORICK WILKS is Professor of Computer Science at the University of
Sheffield and Director of ILASH, the Institute of Language, Speech and
Hearing. For the eight years 1985-93 he was Director of the Computing
Research Laboratory at New Mexico State University, a centre for
research in artificial intelligence and its applications. He received
his doctorate from Cambridge University in 1968 for work in computer
programs that understand written English in terms of a theory later
called "preference semantics": the claim that language is to be
understood by means of a search for semantic "gists", combined with a
coherence function over such structures that minimises effort in the
analyser. This has continued as the focus of his work, and has had
applications in the areas of machine translation, the use of English
as a "front end" for users of data bases, and the computation of
belief structures. He was a researcher at Stanford AI Laboratory, and
then Professor of Computer Science and Linguistics at the University
of Essex before going to New Mexico. He has published numerous
articles and five books in that area of artificial intelligence, of
which the most recent are Artificial Believers (with Afzal Ballim)
from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (1991) and Electric Words:
dictionaries, computers and meanings (with Brian Slator and Louise
Guthrie) MIT Press, (1995). He is also a Fellow of the American
Association for Artificial Intelligence, on advisory committees for
the National Science Foundation, and on the boards of some fifteen
AI-related journals. He currently works in the areas of information
extraction from text sources, computational pragmatics, and the
automatic of linguistic resources such as lexicons and grammars.
For further information contact:
Dr. Hui Liu, Department of Computer Science, Birkbeck College
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