14 January 2011

Two new grants for Mark Stevenson

Dr. Mark Stevenson of the Natural Language Processing Research Group has received two new research grants.

One research project, "Distinguishing Common and Proper Nouns", is funded through the Google Research Awards programme. Proper names occur frequently on the web and are important for search engines since they are often of interest to users. However, many of these names are ambiguous and can also be common nouns - for example "Bush" could refer to a politician or a plant. Being able to distinguish proper names and common nouns is necessary to identify relevant web pages. This project will develop techniques for (1) automatically generating lists of nouns that have both common and proper usages and (2) distinguishing between these usages. These methods will be based on techniques from Information Extraction (IE) and Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD).

Mark's second grant is PATHS: Personalising Access To cultural Heritage Spaces, funded by the EU (£621k). The grant is held jointly with Paul Clough and Nigel Ford of the Information School. Significant amounts of cultural heritage material are now available through online digital library portals. However, this vast amount of cultural heritage material can also be overwhelming for many users who are provided with little or no guidance on how to find and interpret this information. The situation is very different in museums and galleries where items are organised thematically and users guided through the collection. The PATHS project will create a system that acts as an interactive personalised tour guide through existing digital library collections. The system will offer suggestions about items to look at and assist in their interpretation. Navigation will be based around the metaphor of a path through the collection. A path can be based around any theme, for example artist and media ("paintings by Picasso"), historic periods ("the Cold War"), places ("Venice") and famous people ("Muhammad Ali"). Users will be able to construct their own paths or follow pre-defined ones. The PATHS project will provide users with innovative ways to access and utilise the contents of digital libraries that enrich their experiences of these resources. This will be achieved by extending the state-of-the-art in user-driven information access and by applying language technologies to analyse and enrich online content. The project will take a user-centred approach to development to accommodate the needs, interests and preferences of different types of users.

You can read more about Mark's research on his personal home page.