March 2007 |
Public Access to On-Line Demonstrator |
The
LOGON on-line web interface
is now open for public access. The site allows one to translate
individual sentences (within the LOGON domain and vocabulary of backcountry
tourism), including full access to intermediate representations.
For comparison to other approaches to Norwegian–English MT, the
demonstrator attempts to scrape further translations off the Internet.
Computational resources are limited; be gentle on the demonstrator!
|
February 2007 |
Public Celebration of KUNSTI Results |
On February 8 and 9, the national
KUNSTI funding scheme presents project
results to the scientific and general public.
The two-day conference is attended by
approximately 50 participants, representing academia, industry, media, and the public sector.
LOGON is represented in the program with an ‘open-microphone’
demonstration and overview poster, as well as with an in-depth
summary presentation of major project results.
On the second day of the conference, the nationwide newspaper
Dagbladet prints a comprehensive
summary of contemporary developments in machine translation, including a
detailed discussion of LOGON (in Norwegian).
|
January 2007 |
Invited Presentation on LOGON Results |
The
17th Computational
Linguistics in the Netherlands conference invites Stephan Oepen to
provide an overview of LOGON results to date.
His presentation at CLIN highlights the utility of
Efficient
HPSG Realization for Precision Machine Translation.
|
December 2006 |
It is Finished |
The developers team delivers the final LOGON integration, release 1.0
(codenamed Fjell). Completing an intense, multi-site
blood-toil-tears-and-sweat effort, the final system version arrives at
64.8 per cent end-to-end coverage on the Jotunheimen development corpus.
Only hours following the final release, LOGON evaluators make available the
(previously carefully protected) held-out test data from the same corpus,
and it emerges that system performance on unseen data appears comparable to
that on the development corpus:
At 71.4 per cent coverage on the Jotunheimen
test corpus with vocabulary known to the system and (an unexpectedly high)
56.1 per cent on test data with unknown vocabulary, there is little reason
to fear that the final system is overly tuned to its 4000-sentence
development
corpus. Obviously, end-to-end coverage is but only one parameter in
judging the final system version, where human judgements on translation
quality are to be compiled by evaluators within the months to come.
Furthermore, looking at
coverage evolution throughout the development cycle
(compare to March 2005 below), it would seem that the earlier projection of
a linear increase in development time was surprisingly accurate, if not
underestimating
system evolution. Looking at LOGON releases 0.5 through 1.0, a third-grade
polynomial actually yields a better correlation than the original linear
regression. Developers celebrate on the streets of Norway (and San
Franciso). Sadly, with the completion of LOGON, there will not be further
releases to determine how far the project can push this favourable pattern
of incremental system improvement.
|
December 2006 |
Joint Presentation with TrePil Project |
LOGON members Victoria Rosén and Paul Meurer continue the proud
tradition of presenting at the annual
Fifth International
Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theory (in Prague, Czech Republic).
In joint work with the
project TrePil at UiB,
and accompanied by TrePil project manager Koenraad de Smedt, they
present their paper
Towards
a Toolkit Linking Treebanking and Grammar Development.
|
September 2006 |
MSc Thesis on Computational Lexicography |
LOGON stipendiary Lars Nygaard completes his
MSc thesis
Fra Ordbok til Ordnett (‘Dictionary to Word Net’) at
the UiO Department of Linguistics and
Nordic Studies.
Supervised by Ruth Vatvedt Fjeld, the thesis develops a methodology for the
acquisition of lexical semantic relations like synonymy or hyperonymy from
a published dictionary of Norwegian.
|
September 2006 |
Doubling Parsing Efficiency Jointly with Zhang Yi |
During a one-week visit of
Zhang Yi of
Saarland University,
he, Stephan, and Dan discuss the adaptation of the selective unpacking
technique used in the LOGON generator (see October 2005) to the
PET parsing engine.
Only days after the completion of his visit to Norway, Zhang Yi releases
an extended version of PET that, when applying the ERG to the LOGON corpus,
yields more than a
two-fold reduction in average parsing time (and up to a
six-fold reduction in memory usage on complex inputs). Dan (and others)
will now be so much more efficient in extending the ERG (or other DELPH-IN
grammars).
|
August 2006 |
Research Visit by Carl Pollard |
Right after completion of his teaching duties at
ESLLI 2006,
Carl Jesse Pollard of the
Ohio State University arrives
at UiO for a five-week research visit.
Carl works closely with Dan (and to a lesser degree Jan Tore and Stephan)
on the syntax and semantics of degree specification (almost but not
quite every summit), adverbs (nearly vs. often), derived
adjectives (e.g. red-tailed), pronoun binding, and other topics
of common interest. During his stay, Carl enjoys the Norwegian late summer
and provides an advanced tutorial on his emerging framework of
Higher Order
Grammar.
|
July 2006 |
Far and Away |
LOGON is represented with no less than four project members at the
Joint conference of the
International Committee on Computational Linguistics and the Association
for Computational Linguistics (ACL|COLING), held in Sydney, Australia;
with its many hundreds of participants, ACL|COLING is the by far largest
scientific gathering in our field (and yet remains among the most
competitive conferences).
LOGON results are represented in the conference program by virtue of an
Interactive Presentation Re-Usable Tools for Precision Machine
Translation (by Jan Tore Lønning and Stephan Oepen) and through
the paper Statistical
Ranking in Tactical Generation (by Erik Velldal and Stephan Oepen)
that was accepted for EMNLP 2006.
|
June 2006 |
German–English Adaptation of LOGON |
During a one-week research visit of Micha Jellinghaus from
Saarland University, Micha and
LOGON developers at UiO produce a bi-directional German–English
prototype instantiation of the LOGON MT architecture. Similar to
on-going Japanese–English efforts, this strain of work is based on
a pre-existing, MRS-enabled comprehensive
HPSG implementation of German (GG).
As part of his MSc thesis at Saarland University, supervised by Berthold
Crysmann, Micha investigates the
Automatic Acquisition of Semantic Transfer Rules for MT.
|
Mid-Summer 2006 |
Guest Lecture by Ivan Sag |
Just in time for a beautiful mid-summer night,
Ivan Sag of
Stanford
University stops over at UiO as part of a visit to Europe.
Ivan presents on his recent psycholinguistic investigations,
Explaining
Islands without Island Constraints, joint work with others at
Stanford.
|
June 2006 |
LOGON Hosts Two International Events
in Norway |
The LOGON consortium organizes the
11th Annual Conference of
the European Association for Machine
Translation.
The two-day conference is held on the campus of the
University of Oslo and attracts about one
hundred partcipants.
LOGON is represented in the scientific programme of the conference with
two presentations, one on Identifying Complex Phenomena in a Corpus via
a Treebank Lens (by Dan Flickinger), another on Using a Bi-Lingual
Dictionary in Lexical Transfer (by Lars Nygård and others).
Immediately preceding the EAMT conference, LOGON members Dan Flickinger and
Stephan Oepen host the
Second Annual
DELPH-IN Summit in the Norwegian mountains.
A little over thirty DELPH-IN members from Europe, the US, Asia, and
Australia gather for five days at Fefor Høyfjellshotell to exchange
research results and make joint plans for on-going DELPH-IN activities.
|
June 2006 |
Another MSc Thesis Complete |
LOGON stipendiary Arnt Richard Johansen completes his
MSc thesis
Human Benchmarks in Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation at
the NTNU Department of Language and
Communnication Sciences.
Supervised by Torbjørn Nordgård, the thesis reports on
empirical results contrasting automatic MT evaluation metrics with the
quality of translations produced by middle school language learners.
|
May 2006 |
MSc Thesis on Compound Translation |
LOGON stipendiary Hanne Moa completes her
MSc thesis
Search
Engines and Linguistics: With a Case Study of an Automated Compound
Translator Using Search Engines. at the NTNU
Department of Language and
Communnication Sciences.
Under the supervision of Torbjørn Nordgård, the thesis
investigates the translation of Norwegian compounds into English.
|
April 2006 |
A Familiar Visitor from Japan |
Late in April,
Francis Bond
from the Communication Sciences
Research Laboratory of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone
Corporation (NTT, Japan) returns to UiO for a five-week stay as a LOGON guest
researcher. Based on the LOGON technology, Francis is engaged in a joint
effort with colleagues at the
Nara Institute of Science and Technology to
develop a bi-directional Japanese–English adaptation of the translation
system.
|
March 2006 |
LOGON Release 0.7 Shows Linear Coverage Gains |
At the semi-annual project gathering (held at
Fefor), developers present the results of the latest
LOGON integration, release 0.7 (codenamed Vår).
Since the LOGON Jotunheimen development corpus became available in May 2005,
this is the third release targeting this particular text collection and
genre. Looking at the
evolution
of end-to-end coverage in releases 0.5
(codenamed Knut) through 0.7, it looks as if the consortium has
accomplished a contiguous linear increase in end-to-end coverage.
Developers are encouraged by this observation, though sceptical about their
ability to hold up that ambitious trend throughout remaining integrations.
Watch this space to see whether they will!
|
February 2006 |
Another MSc Thesis Complete |
LOGON stipendiary Gisle Ytresøl completes his
MSc thesis Universelle Representasjoner av Norske Klokkeslett
(‘General Representations for Norwegian Times-of-Day’) at the
UiB Department of Linguistics
and Literature.
Under the supervision of Helge Dyvik, this thesis proposes an MRS account
of time-of-day expressions that is implemented within the LOGON analysis
component.
|
November 2005 |
MSc Thesis on Numerals |
LOGON stipendiary Gyri Smørdal Losnegaard completes her
MSc thesis The Syntax and Semantics of Norwegian Numerals:
An Analysis for MT at the
UiB Department of Linguistics
and Literature.
Supervised by Helge Dyvik, the thesis develops a compositional account of
the internal structure of complex number expressions that is integrated
with the LOGON analysis grammar NorGram.
|
October 2005 |
Best Paper Award to LOGON
Generation Component |
At the
Second International Joint
Conference on Natural Language Processing, John Carroll and Stephan
Oepen receive the IJCNLP Best Paper award for their joint work on the
LOGON generation component. Their paper
High-Efficiency
Realization for a Wide-Coverage Unification Grammar
reviews a series of novel algorithmic contributions to chart generation,
defines a procedure for selective enumeration of n-best results,
and presents an in-depth empirical evaluation. IJCNLP 2005 was a highly
competitive conference this year, accepting just above thirty per cent of
the nearly 300 submissions that were received.
Congratulations, John and Stephan!
|
September 2005 |
LOGON Representation at MT Summit |
At the Tenth
MT Summit, held in Phuket (Thailand) this year, LOGON research was
presented through a total of three presentations, viz. one by Dan
Flickinger et al. on
SEM-I
Rational MT—Enriching Deep Grammars with a Semantic
Interface for Scalable Machine Translation, one by Erik Velldal and
Stephan Oepen on
Maximum
Entropy Models for Realization Ranking, and a joint contribution
with colleagues from
DFKI Saarbrücken (Germany),
NTT Japan, and
the University of Cambridge (UK) on
Open
Source Machine Translation with DELPH-IN.
|
August 2005 |
LOGON Members Co-Organize DELPH-IN Meeting |
LOGON researchers Dan Flickinger and Stephan Oepen co-organize the
First Annual Meeting
of the Deep Linguistic Processing
with HPSG Initiative (DELPH-IN).
The meeting, co-located with the International HPSG Conference in Lisboa
(Portugal), had close to forty participants from all around the world,
including (besides Dan and Stephan) another two LOGON members, viz.
Lars Hellan and Petter Haugereid from NTNU.
|
Summer 2005 |
Joint Publications with Japanese Colleagues |
Reflecting on joint work with colleagues at the
Communication Sciences
Research Laboratory of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone
Corporation (NTT, Japan), LOGON members succeed in publishing results in
two of the biggest conferences in our field, viz. at the
Annual Meeting of the Association
for Computational Linguistics in Ann Arbor (MI)—on
High
Precision Treebanking. Blazing Useful Trees Using POS
Information—and at
International Joint Conference
on Artificial Intelligence in Edinburgh (UK)—on
Robust Ontology Acquisition from Machine-Readable
Dictionaries.
|
July 2005 |
International LFG Conference |
The
International Lexical Functional
Grammar Conference 2005 is
hosted by, among others, LOGON researchers Helge Dyvik and Victoria
Rosén
between July 18 and July 20, 2005, at
Bergen University.
LOGON member Dan Flickinger gives an invited talk on Weighing the
Utility of Types in Grammatical Description. Furthermore, LOGON
is representend with a paper by
Helge Dyvik, Victoria Rosén, and Paul Meurer on
LFG, Minimal
Recursion Semantics and Translation, and no less than
three poster presentations.
|
June 2005 |
Research Award to LOGON Member |
Stephan Oepen, the Technical Manager of LOGON, is named an outstanding
research talent and awarded a prize by the Faculty of Arts,
the University of Oslo, at the
event of celebrating the new name of the faculty. You can read more at
the faculty pages
or at the national research portal
forskning.no (both in Norwegian).
|
June 2005 |
MSc Thesis on Noun Countability |
Einar Stubhaug, LOGON stipendiary at UiO, completes his MSc thesis on
Extracting
Lexical Information on the Countability of Norwegian Nouns by Means of
Corpus Methods.
Einar was supervised by Jan Tore Lønning.
Our congratulations go to both of them!
|
April & May 2005 |
A Wave of LOGON Publications |
Project members have been very successful at publishing research results in
international conferences this spring, including two presentations at the
2nd
ACL SIGSEM Workshop on The Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions
(at Essex University, UK),
a total of ten presentations (of which six were contributed by
junior members of LOGON) at the
15th
Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (in Joensuu, Finland),
and one paper in
the 10th Annual
Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation
(in Budapest, Hungary).
|
April 2005 |
Guest Researcher from Japan |
Late in April,
Francis Bond
from the Communication Sciences
Research Laboratory of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone
Corporation (NTT, Japan) arrives for a three-month stay as a LOGON guest
researcher at UiO. Francis will work with other LOGON members on refining
English generation (specifically regarding determiner choice and aspects
of noun countability) and, in parallel, aims to combine LOGON resources with
the DELPH-IN open-source
grammar of Japanese to assemble
a bi-directional Japanese–English MT system. Francis introduced
himself at UiO by means of a colloquium presentation on
The
Hinoki Treebank.
|
April 2005 |
Guest Lecture on Countability |
While touring Europe,
Timothy Baldwin from the
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Melbourne
University stops over for a research visit with LOGON. While at UiO,
Tim presents his work on
Countability
Learning: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
|
April 2005 |
Additional LOGON Team Member |
As of April 1 (no jokes),
Dan Flickinger joins the LOGON
team at UiO as an associate research professor. Dan is the
developer of the LinGO English
Resource Grammar (ERG), the generation grammar for LOGON, and has taken
a leave of absence from Stanford
University to work with LOGON. Welcome, Dan!
|
March 2004 |
MSc Thesis on Collocations |
Another LOGON stipendiary, Eszter Horvati, completes her MSc thesis at
UiO. Supervised by Jan Tore Lønning, Eszter has investigated
and evaluated methods for the
Automated
Acquisition of Norwegian Collocations. Congratulations!
|
December 2004 |
MSc Thesis on Locatives in MT |
LOGON stipendiary
Fredrik Jørgensen
is the first to complete his MSc thesis
The Semantic Representation of Locatives in Machine Translation under
the auspices of the project (supervised by Jan Tore Lønning and
Stephan Oepen). Congratulations to Fredrik!
|
December 2004 |
Presentations at TLT |
LOGON members present their research at the
Third International
Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theory, viz. in the form of a
paper on
Paraphrasing
Treebanks for Stochastic Realization Ranking (by Erik Velldal,
Stephan Oepen, and Dan Flickinger) and as a poster and
demonstration of
TreeSearch.
A User-Friendly Treebank Search Interface (by Lars Nygaard and
Janne Bondi Johannessen).
|
September & October 2004 |
Presentations at AMTA & TMI |
LOGON is represented at two major MT conferences this fall, viz.
The 6th Conference of the
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) as part of
the Research and Deployment Showcase exhibition and with an
accepted
paper at
The 10th International Conference
on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation,
in Washington (DC) and Baltimore (MD), respectively.
|
September 2004 |
UiO Joins Multi-National Collaboration |
The MT Research Group at Oslo University joins the
Deep Linguistic Processing with HPSG
Initiative (DELPH-IN) and contributes the LOGON transfer engine—a
general-purpose MRS rewrite system—to the DELPH-IN open-source
repository.
|
August 2004 |
MSc Stipends at UiO |
Oslo University offers two six-month stipends
for MSc
thesis projects conducted under LOGON auspices at the UiO
Linguistics Institute.
Applications including a resume and brief sketch of the proposed MSc
project should be submitted by August 26, 2004.
|
August 2004 |
International HPSG Conference |
Co-located at the
11th
International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar,
Dorothee Beermann and Lars Hellan co-organize a
Workshop on
Semantics in Grammar Engineering.
Dorothee and Lars present a paper on semantic decomposition in HPSG as part
of the workshop, and LOGON doctoral researchers Liv Ellingsen and Petter
Haugereid give presentations on their work on Norwegian in the main
conference and workshop, respectively.
|
July & August 2004 |
Overseas Visitors |
Norway swarms with international visitors this summer:
Dan Flickinger from the Center
for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University (US) spends
July and August at UiO and October at NTNU as a LOGON guest researcher.
Francis Bond,
long-time member of the MT Research Group at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone
Corporation (NTT, Japan), visits UiO for two weeks in July to assess the
current LOGON prototype and explore adaptations of the technology to
Japanese; Francis gives two presentations, one an overview of MT activities
in Japan, another on
Two
Approaches to Generating Articles.
Towards the end of August,
Rob Malouf (San Diego State
University, CA), developer of the estimate Maximum Entropy toolkit
used by LOGON stops over at UiO for one week; Rob gives a presentation on
Mining
Corpora for Linguistic Insights and chairs a session of the UiO
Machine Learning reading group on
Support
Vector Machines.
|
July 2004 |
Mini-Workshop on Generation |
Jointly with the EU-funded
Deep Thought project,
LOGON researchers organize the 3rd International Mini-Workshop
on Efficient MRS-Based Generation at
Fefor Høifjellshotell.
Following the workshop,
John
Carroll (University of Sussex, UK) and
Ann
Copestake (Cambridge University, UK) visit UiO for a three-day
‘work camp’, which results in a speed-up to the LKB
generator that appears to be exponential in input complexity.
|
April 2004 |
Recent Advances in Scandinavian MT |
LOGON researchers participate in the preparation of the Workshop on
Recent Advances in Scandinavian
Machine Translation.
Helge Dyvik gives an invited keynote presentation on Semantics for
Translation: The Possible Contribution of the Mirrors Method.
Jan Tore Lønning and Lars Hellan provide an
overview
of LOGON results to date, and Torbjørn Nordgård
presents a paper
On
Commercialization of Scandinavian MT (jointly with Tronn Skjerstad of
LingIT AS).
|
March 2004 |
LOGON Web Site Goes On-Line |
With lots of help from Rolf,
a first version of the re-worked and scalable LOGON web pages goes public.
Many thanks, Rolf!
|
February 2004 |
Doctoral Stipends Awarded at UiO |
Liv Ellingsen and
Erik Velldal are appointed as
LOGON doctoral researchers for three years. Liv investigates the
interaction of grammatical and soft constraints and Erik explores the
acquisition and use of stochastic processes to manage transfer-level
and generator ambiguity in MT.
|
January 2004 |
Doctoral Stipend Awarded at UiB |
Gunn Inger Lyse is appointed as a LOGON doctoral researcher for three years.
Gunn pursues research on the utilization of semantic information acquired
through the
Semantic Mirrors
method for automated word sense disambiguation.
|
December 2003 |
Guest Researcher at UiO |
John
Carroll from the University of Sussex (UK) spends two weeks at UiO as a LOGON guest researcher. In joint work with Stephan Oepen, John improves
LKB generation performance by two exponential factors.
|
September – December 2003 |
Guest Researcher at UiO |
Dan Flickinger from the Center
for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University (US) spends
three months at NTNU as a LOGON guest researcher. Dan is the developer of
the LinGO English Resource Grammar (ERG) used for English generation in
LOGON; he adapts and tunes the grammar for the tourism domain and builds a
treebank of annotated LOGON data.
|
September 2003 |
Invited Presentation at TLT 2003 |
Stephan Oepen is invited as a keynote speaker at the
Second International
Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theory.
Stephan presents on
Treebanks
versus Linguistic Theory. — Anyone Need Grammars?.
|
February 2003 |
Doctoral Stipend Awarded at NTNU |
Petter Haugereid is appointed as a LOGON doctoral researcher for three years.
Petter investigates the syntax – semantics interface in scalable
constraint-based grammars, specifically in relation to the
NorSource
initiative on building a broad-coverage Norwegian HPSG implementation.
|