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From Language Technology to e-Science, and back again

by Professor Ewan Klein

Lecture Details:
5.15 pm, Thursday 18 November 2004
Lecture Theatre 2
Appleton Tower (reference 24 on this map)
Crichton Street
Reception after the lecture, on level 4 of Appleton Tower

Abstract:

Over the last two decades, computer processing of natural language has grown from small-scale research projects to something closer to engineering. Although we are still a long way from being able to build computer programs that 'understand' language, there has been steady progress in developing language technology that can perform useful tasks in a reliable way in a variety of contexts. I will describe one particular technology that has been explored over a number of years within the Edinburgh -- Named Entity Recognition -- and illustrate it with some applications, particularly in the e-Science area. The UK e-Science initiative has focussed on developing a global computational infrastructure to support large-scale collaborative scientific research. An integral part of much research involves reading the relevant literature and since more and more text is available online, there is a both a need and an opportunity to make appropriate text processing tools available to researchers. Our group has been working on collaborative text processing applications in the areas of molecular biology, astronomy and human geography.

An interesting question is whether the investment in developing infrastructure for e-Science can also contribute to building better language technology. It is becoming apparent that researchers in natural language processing are faced with many of the same challenges as other areas, specifically the need to analyse large, possibly distributed, data sets in a computationally intensive manner. Edinburgh is one of a small number of groups around the world that are beginning to apply ideas and techniques from Grid computing and the Semantic Web to support natural language processing; I will describe our preliminary work in this area, and indicate some directions for future exploration.

Biography:

Throughout his professional career, Ewan has worked on natural language in one form or another. It is common to distinguish knowledge of language into three main components, namely semantics, syntax and phonology and Ewan has worked in all of these areas. In the early part of his career he focussed mainly on theoretical models of natural language, but over the years, his interests have turned increasingly towards computational models and to the challenge of deploying natural language processing technology within broader computational applications.

Ewan obtained a BA degree in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge, then completed an MA in General Linguistics at the University of Reading. He obtained his PhD from Cambridge. He worked at the University of Sussex as a research fellow then as a lecturer in Newcastle upon Tyne. He joined the University of Edinburgh in 1983 as an Advanced Research Fellow in what was then the School of Epistemics, and he has been with us ever since.

Ewan Klein is Professor of Language Technology at the University of Edinburgh. He is a world-leader in this field and has promoted a series of European projects that have developed pan-European capabilities in Natural Language Processing (ELSNET Network of Excellence in Speech and Language and the DYANA Basic Research Action. As well as providing research leadership, Ewan has worked on technology transfer to industry as Director of Natural Language Research of Edify Corporation and as a major contributor to other outreach activities e.g. Memex, RCAHMS, Stile, EDINA, edikt, etc in association with the SEER (Stanford Link) project on Named Entity Recognition. He is a member of editorial boards for several major international specialist journals: Linguistcs, Linguistics and Philosophy, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Language and Cognitive Processes, Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, Journal of Logic, Language and Information. He has recently been invited to give talks in Amsterdam, Chicago, Wisconsin (Madison), Stanford, Brussels, San Marino, Utrecht, Gronningen, Stuttgart, etc.