Lic Thesis Seminar: Natural Language Processing Methods for Automatic Illustration of Text

Date: March 08, 2006 (Wednesday) at 13:15

Richard Johansson presents his Lic. Thesis: Natural Language Processing Methods for Automatic Illustration of Text

The thesis describes methods for automatic creation of illustrations of natural-language text. Specifically, we focus on what is necessary to perform automatic illustration of texts describing sequences of events in a physical world, which we call \emph{text-to-scene conversion}. The first part of the thesis describes Carsim, a system that automatically illustrates traffic accident newspaper reports written in Swedish. This system is the first text-to-scene conversion system for non-invented texts.

The second part of the thesis focuses on methods to generalize the NLP components of Carsim to make it more easily portable to new domains of application. Specifically, we develop methods to sidestep the scarcity of annotated data, needed for training and testing of NLP methods. We present a method to annotate the Swedish side of a parallel corpus with shallow semantic information in the FrameNet standard. This corpus is then used to train a semantic role labeler for Swedish text.

Room: LTH, E:1406