Research (projects and publications)

(2001-2004) Brighton's PI on the project NECA on the generation of dialogues between embodied conversational agents. EUR 250,000 from the EU. 2001-2004. (Grant coordinated by OEFAI, Vienna.)

(2003-2007) Co-I on COGENT, on Controlled Generation of Text. £210,000 from EPSRC.

(2003-2007) PI on the TUNA project, on the generation of referring expressions, £220,000 from EPSRC.

(2007-2012) Co-I on the project "Affecting People with Natural Language". Platform Grant supporting Aberdeen's Natural Language Generation group. £650,000 from EPSRC.

(2012-2016) PI, with Ellen Bard (Edinburgh), on the research network RefNet. Approx. £130,000 from the EPSRC. RefNet brings computational linguists, psychologists and linguists together around the theme of reference. See this page for information about RefNet.

(2012-2016) PI on the research project WhatIf, £542,078 from the EPSRC The project seeks to use techniques derived from natural language dialogue to facilitate the authoring of formal ontologies.

(2012-2015) Co-I on the research project Scrutable Autonomous Systems (Sassy) Approx. £1,200,000 from the EPSRC. The project uses Argumentation Theory and Natural Language Generation to clarify the content of computer-generated plans. My colleague Wamberto Vasconcelos is the PI of Sassy.

Here are some selected papers, organised by research topic (hence with duplicates). In the spirit of open access, I've made (near-)final versions downloadable wherever I can.

• Vagueness and ambiguity

  (Van Deemter 1995) The Sorites Fallacy and the Context-dependence of Vague Predicates. In Kanazawa, Pinon and de Swart (eds.), "Quantifiers, Deduction, and Context". CSLI Publications, Stanford, Ca., pp.59-86.
  

  (Van Deemter 1995) Towards a Logic of Ambiguous Expressions. In Van Deemter and Peters (eds.) "Semantic Ambiguity and Underspecification", pp.203-237. CSLI Publications, Stanford, Ca.
  To buy the entire collection of papers, go here. Here is a review.
  

  (Van Deemter 1998) Ambiguity and Idiosyncratic Interpretation. Journal of Semantics Vol. 15 (1), 1998, pp.5-36.
  

  (Van Deemter 2004) Finetuning an NLG system through experiments with human subjects: the case of vague descriptions. In Proc. of 3rd International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG-04), Brockenhurst, UK.
  

  (Van Deemter 2006) Generating Referring Expressions that involve Gradable Properties. Computational Linguistics (32) 2, 2006.
  

  (Van Deemter 2009) What Game Theory can do for NLG: the case of vague language. Keynote paper, 12th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG-2009), Athens, Greece.
  

  (Van Deemter 2009) Utility and language generation: the case of vagueness. Journal of Philosophical Logic 38 (6).
  

  (Van Deemter 2010) Vagueness Facilitates Search. In Proc. of the 2009 Amsterdam Colloquium, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). FoLLI LNAI 6042.
  

  (van Deemter 2010) "Not Exactly: in Praise of Vagueness" Oxford University Press, Oxford 2010.

  (Van Deemter 2013) The Two Cultures of Logic. In R.Seising, E.Trillas, C.Moraga and S.Termini (eds.): On Fuzziness. A Homage to Lotfi A. Zadeh (Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing Vol. 216), Berlin, New York: Springer 2013.

• Anaphora

  (Van Deemter 1990) Forward References in Natural Language. Journal of Semantics 7, 1990, pp.281-300. A different route to the same paper can be found here.
  

  (Van Deemter 1992) Towards a Generalization of Anaphora. Journal of Semantics 9, 1992, pp.27-51. A different route to the same paper can be found here.
  

  (Krahmer and Van Deemter 1998) On the Interpretation of Anaphoric Noun Phrases: Towards a Full Understanding of Partial Matches. Journal of Semantics Vol. 15 (2), 1998, pp. 355-392.
  

• Natural Language Generation foundations and architectures:

  (Van Deemter and Odijk 1997) Context Modeling and the Generation of Spoken Discourse. Speech Communication 21 (1997) p. 101-121.
  

  (Van Deemter 2004) Towards a probabilistic version of bidirectional OT syntax and semantics.. Journal of Semantics, 21(3) August 2004.
  

  (Van Deemter, Krahmer, and Theune 2005) Real vs. template-based NLG: a false opposition? Computational Linguistics 31 (1), 2005.
  

  (Van Deemter 2009) What Game Theory can do for NLG: the case of vague language. Keynote, 12th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG-2009).
  

  (van Deemter and Reiter [in press]). Lying and Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication in J.Meibauer (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Lying. Pre-final draft.
  

• Description Logic and Conceptual Graphs

  (Croitoru and Van Deemter 2007) A Conceptual Graph Approach to the Generation of Referring Expressions In Proc. of IJCAI-2007, Hyderabad, India.
  

  (Ren, Van Deemter, and Pan 2010) Charting the potential of Description Logic for the Generation of Referring Expressions.

  (Ren, Parvizi, Mellish, Pan, van Deemter and Stevens 2014). Towards Competency Question-driven Ontology Authoring. In Procs. of The Semantic Web: Trends and Challenges, the 11th European Semantic Web Conference. Springer.
  

  (Dennis, van Deemter, Dell'Aglio, and Pan [accepted]). Computing Authoring Tests from Competency Questions: Experimental Validation. To appear in Proc. of International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC-2017).
  

• Referring expressions and their generation:

  (Van Deemter and Kibble 2000) On Coreferring: Coreference in MUC and related annotation schemes. Computational Linguistics 26, No. 4, Dec. 2000.
  

  (Van Deemter and Halldorssson 2001) Logical Form Equivalence: the case of Referring Expressions Generation, in Proc. of 8th Europaean Workshop on Natural Language Generation (EWNLG2001), Toulouse.
  

  (Van Deemter 2002) Generating Referring Expressions: Boolean Extensions of the Incremental Algorithm. Computational Linguistics 28 (1) p.37-52.
  

  (Van Deemter 2004) Finetuning an NLG system through experiments with human subjects: the case of vague descriptions. In Proc. of 3rd International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG-04), Brockenhurst, UK.
  

  (Van Deemter 2006) Generating Referring Expressions that involve Gradable Properties. Computational Linguistics (32) 2, 2006.
  

  (Van Deemter and Krahmer 2006) Graphs and Booleans: on the generation of referring expressions In H.Bunt and R.Muskens (Eds.) ``Computing Meaning, Volume 3", Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, Kluwer, Dordrecht.
  

  (Croitoru and Van Deemter 2007) A Conceptual Graph Approach to the Generation of Referring Expressions In Proc. of IJCAI-2007, Hyderabad, India.
  

  (Paraboni, Van Deemter, and Masthoff 2007) Generating Referring Expressions: Making Referents Easy to Identity. Computational Linguistics 33 (2).
  

  (Gatt and Van Deemter 2007) Lexical choice and conceptual perspective in the generation of plural referring expressions. Journal of Logic, Language and Information (JoLLI), 16(4): 423-443.
  

  (van Deemter and Gatt (2009) Beyond DICE: measuring the quality of a referring expression. In Proc. of COGSCI workshop ``Production of Referring Expressions'', Amsterdam, July 2009.
  

  (Ren, Van Deemter, and Pan 2010) Charting the potential of Description Logic for the Generation of Referring Expressions. In Proc. INLG-2010, Trim, Ireland.
  

  (Krahmer and van Deemter 2012) Computational Generation of Referring Expressions: A Survey. Computational Linguistics 38 (1), March 2012, pp.173-218.
  

  (Khan, van Deemter and Ritchie 2012) Managing ambiguity in reference generation: the role of surface structure. Topics in Cognitive Science 4(2), pp.211-231.
  Members of the Cognitive Science Society may download a copy from here.
  

  (Van Deemter, Gatt, van Gompel and Krahmer 2012) Towards a computational psycholinguistics of reference production. Topics in Cognitive Science 4(2), pp.166-183.
  Members of the Cognitive Science Society may download a copy from here.
  

  (Van Deemter, Gatt, van der Sluis and Power 2012) Generation of referring expressions: assessing the incremental algorithm. Cognitive Science 36:5, July 2012.
  

  (Van Deemter, Gatt, van der Sluis and Power 2012) Assessing the Incremental Algorithm: a Response to Krahmer et al. Letter to the Editor. Cognitive Science 36:5, July 2012.
  

  (Kutlak, van Deemter, and Mellish 2012) Corpus-based Metrics for Assessing Communal Common Ground. In Proc. of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Sapporo, Japan.

  (Van Deemter 2013) Referability. Chapter in Natural Language Genetration in Interactive Systems, edited by A.Stent and S.Bangalore, Cambridge University Press. (Pre-final version.)
  

  (Mitchell, van Deemter, and Reiter 2013) Generating Expressions that Refer to Visual Objects. In Proc. of the 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. Atlanta, Georgia, June 2013. Pre-final version .

  Mitchell, Reiter, and van Deemter 2013) Typicality and Object Reference. In Proc. of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Berlin Aug. 2013. Pre-final version .

  (Gatt, Krahmer, van Gompel, and van Deemter 2013) Production of Referring Expressions: Preference Trumps Discrimination. In Proc. of the 35th Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Berlin, Aug. 2013. Pre-final version .

  (Kutlak, van Deemter, and Mellish 2013) Generation of Referring Expressions in Large Domains. In Proc. of the third workshop Production of Peferring Expressions, associated with CogSci 2013.

  (Paraboni and van Deemter 2014). Reference and the Facilitation of Search in Spatial Domains. Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience 29 (8). journal version. Pre-final version.

  (Gatt, Krahmer, van Deemter, and van Gompel 2014) Models and empirical Data for the Production of Referring Expressions. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 29 (8). journal version.

  (van Deemter 2016) Computational Models of Referring: a Study in Cognitive Science", MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., May/June 2016.

  (Gatt, Krahmer, van Deemter, and van Gompel 2016). Reference production as search: The impact of domain size on the production of distinguishing descriptions. Cognitive Science, June 2016. This is a pre-final version.

  (Kutlak, van Deemter, and Mellish 2016). Production of Referring Expressions for an Unknown Audience: A Computational Model of Communal Common Ground. Frontiers in Psychology, 31 Aug. 2016. final version (open access).

  (van Deemter, in press). Designing Algorithms for Referring with Proper Names. In Procs. of the 9th International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG-2016), September 2016, Edinburgh.
  

• Multimodality: pictures, speech and Embodied Conversational Agents:

  (Van Deemter 1994) What's New? A Semantic Perspective on Sentence Accent. Journal of Semantics 11, 1994, pp.1-31. A different route to the same paper can be found here.
  

  (Van Deemter 1998) Towards a Blackboard Model of Accenting. Computer Speech and Language 12 (3), 1998.
  

  (Van Deemter 1999) Document Generation and Picture Retrieval . In Proc. of Third International Conference on Visual Information Systems (VISUAL99), Amsterdam, June 1999.
  

  (Van Deemter and Power 2003) High-Level Authoring of Illustrated Documents . Natural Language Engineering 9 (2), June 2003.
  

  (Piwek, Power, Scott and Van Deemter 2005) Generating Multimedia Presentations: from Plain Text to Screenplay. In O. Stock and M. Zancanara (Eds.) Intelligent Multimodal Information Presentation, Vol.27. Kluwer Publishing, Dordrecht.
  

  (Van Deemter, Krenn, Piwek, Schroeder, Klesen and Baumann 2008) Fully Generated Scripted Dialogue for Embodied Conversational Agents. Artificial Intelligence Journal Vol 172/10, pp. 1219-1244
  

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