News

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!

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.

LOGON researcher 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.

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.

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 one paper and three poster presentations.

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).

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!

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).

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.

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.

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!

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!

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!

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

With lots of help from Rolf, a first version of the re-worked and scalable LOGON web pages goes public. Many thanks, Rolf!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?.

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.