Electronic Grammar Checking in Natural Languages
The next talk in the Icelandic Centre for Language Technology (ICLT) lecture series will be given by Dr. Bettina Harriehausen-Mühlbauer. The title of his talk is Electronic Grammar Checking in Natural Languages and it will be given in English. The lecture will be held in room 201, Reykjavik University, Ofanleiti, on Tuesday, May 20th, at 12:00 noon.
The demand to interact with the machine naturally and at more ease has been a dream and demand since the invention of computers. Many people are hesitant when it comes to man-machine-interaction and would be much more comfortable if interfaces would be more natural, i.e. if they could simply talk or write to the machine. But in order to reach this goal or dream, natural language input has to be almost error-free for the machine to be able to “understand” what is being asked. This is just one scenario that asks for error checking in natural language input. Many other applications in the field of word-processing and/or e-learning also demand grammar help from the machine. But before the machine is able to teach us humans the correct grammar, we humans have to teach the machine, i.e. we have to write electronic garmmars which anticipate or foresee natural language errors – independent of the 4000+ languages of this planet.
In the talk, I will demonstrate the algorithms that are needed for grammar checking and I will discuss various applications in which grammar checking is not only useful but obligatory these days.
Dr. Bettina Harriehausen-Mühlbauer is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt, Germany. She studied computer science and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, USA and got her doctorate degree in Computational Linguistics under the supervision of Prof. Charles Fillmore, linguistics, and Prof. Robert Wilensky, Computer Science.
Bettina worked at IBM’s research labs in Yorktown Heights, New York, USA and Heidelberg, Germany, as well as the development lab in Bethesda, USA. During her 13 years with IBM she worked in the A.I. group, primarily developing NLP tools, such as an electronic grammar for text processing, a grammar for machine translation, and various e-learning applications. 8 years ago, she left industry to accept her position as a tenure professor at the University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt, Germany. Her fields of focus in lectures and research are multimedia, e-learning, and natural language processing. She is supervising students on Bachelor, Master, and PhD level. In parallel to her post in Darmstadt, she is regularly teaching summer schools at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and giving guest lectures in Oulu / Finland, Vellore / India, Xi’an / China, and Townsville / Australia. Bettina is a consultant for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for their North America programme and she is an invited external examiner of the HETAC accreditation agency in Ireland. For more information, you can visit her homepage (www.fbi.h-da.de/~harriehausen).
