U.S.-Switzerland Cooperative Research in Computational Linguistics

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This award supports Professor James Pustejovsky of Brandeis University and a graduate student to collaborate in computational linguistics research with Susan Armstrong and others at the Institute of Semantic and Cognitive Studies (ISSCO) of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. The goal of their research is to account for the way in which words combine, taking advantage of the different perspectives from which this issue has been approached, namely, lexicographic, linguistic and statistical. The problem is to establish a connection between computational semantic theories and practical systems dealing directly with modeling language use through `usage-based` criteria. The Brandeis group brings substantial theoretical experience on lexical semantics and natural language generation, while the Swiss group contributes the computational platform and the multilingual environment for analyzing text, as well as experience in machine translation systems. Collaboration between the U.S. and Swiss research teams will introduce a cross- linguistic perspective by taking advantage of information derived from the analyses of multilingual corpora provided by the Swiss participants. Specifically, the Swiss group is involved in a project to produce automatic multilingual generation of the weather forecasts produced by the Swiss Institute of Meteorology. This collaborative research contributes to the empirical grounding of a theory of semantic selection. Fundamentally, it looks at how word meaning in natural language might be characterized formally, in order to account for both the subtle use of words in different sentences, and the `creative` use of words in novel contexts. The integration of rule-based technique and data driven technique is a major area of interest in natural language processing research. On a practical level, this research will contribute to the development of a multilingual generator and the enhancement of machine translation systems.