Chris Mellish

Department of Computing Science University of Aberdeen King's College ABERDEEN AB24 3UE Room 237 in the Meston Building and Room 906 in the MacRobert Building Telephone +44 (0)1224 272293 Username: c.mellish Domain: abdn.ac.uk

Teaching and Administration

I teach Natural Language Processing and Human Computer Interaction.

Research

My main research is on Natural Language Generation, both theoretical and applied aspects. On the theoretical side, I am interested in architectures, generation algorithms and input representation. On the applied side, I am interested in the costs and benefits of NLG and how we can find application niches where NLG is worthwhile. I am also interested in how generated text can affect the emotions of the reader. One of my main interests is facilitating the building of reusable software modules for NLG (see the RAGS project).

Past projects:

• IDAS (with John Levine and Ehud Reiter) was a system that produced online documentation for electronic equipment. This project was a collaboration with Racal Research, Racal Instruments and Inference Europe. Interesting theoretical issues that arose included the advantages of combining NLG with hypertext (and questions about how the coherence of hypertext can be assessed) and the usefulness of classification as a mechanism for implementing many of the parts of an NLG system.
• CORECT (with John Levine) was a system to help in the design of an electronic system in response to a call for tenders from a customer. This project was in collaboration with Racal Research, Racal Instruments, Intelligent Applications and the University of Sussex. The role of my team was mainly to implement the generation of documents for the different types of people involved in the design process. An interesting theoretical issue that arises here is whether (and how) it is possible to allow users to specify their own document requirements (in terms of form and content).
• GhostWriter. (with John Levine and Brian Drabble) My team worked with the Military Aircraft Division of British Aerospace and Dassault Aviation to investigate the application of artificial intelligence techniques to the production of technical documentation. The main thread of this work concerned the natural language generation of instructional text from knowledge-based models of engineering practices.
• ILEX (with Jon Oberlander, Alistair Knott and Mick O'Donnell) automatically generated labels for items in an electronic catalogue (or museum gallery) in such a way as to reflect the interest of the user and also opportunistically to further certain educational (or other) aims. This project was in collaboration with the National Museums of Scotland, Interactive Information and VIS Interactive Media.
• DEFACTO (with Graeme Ritchie and Paul Bailey) was a feasibility study developing a NLG component for an interactive story system. This project was coordinated by the National Technical University of Athens.
• SOLE (with Jon Oberlander, Paul Taylor, Janet Hitzeman and Alan Black) built a concept-to-speech generation system based on ILEX and the Festival text-to-speech system developed in the Centre for Speech Technology Research. A key aim was to design an interface between the two systems that could be encapsulated into a generally useful speech synthesis markup language.
• HIPS was a large European project, coordinated by the University of Siena, which developed new intelligent interfaces for portable computing devices. The final prototype was a system to guide a user around a museum and the surrounding area. My team's role was to develop the NLG capabilities of such a system.
• M-PIRO (with Marc Moens, Jon Oberlander, Paul Taylor and Jo Calder) was an Edinburgh-based project on multilingual ganeration that I had some involement with.

• Presenting Ontologies in Natural Language (with Tang Sun) investigates issue in how to present parts of ontologies in natural language, to users who wish to understand and make choices using the ontologies.
• RAGS (with Mike Reape) is a project to define a reference architecture for a (hopefully large) class of applied NLG systems. This project is being carried out jointly with reasearchers at the Open University and the University of Brighton. We hope that we can stimulate research and applications of NLG by defining a simple architecture which, though clearly incomplete as a theoretical model, reflects much current practice and is useful enough to be used for real systems. Although funding for this project has finished, the research is still continuing to some extent.
• PolicyGrid (with Pete Edwards, Alun Preece and John Farrington) aims to support policy-related research activities within social science by developing appropriate Grid middleware tools which meet the requirements of social science practitioners. The vision of the Semantic Grid is central to the PolicyGrid research agenda. My particular interest is in using NLP technology in the interfaces between social scientists and the Grid-based tools.
• Affecting People with Natural Language is a long-term project supported by an EPSRC platform grant.
• I am one of the co-investigators of the Rural Economy Digital Research Hub at Aberdeen. I am particularly interested in how software interventions in rural settings will engage with people, and in the role that NLG can play in the interfaces of such systems.

I am also interested in robust natural language processing, logic-based characterisations of NLP and unification-based grammars/ representations.

Useful links:

• The Aberdeen NLG group homepage.
• The Scottish NLG Homepage (very old now...).

I am gradually putting various bits and pieces of software etc. for free distribution into here.

I can recommend a good Shiatsu practitioner who works near Inverness.