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NEWS
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15.5.2008
ICLT Lecture on
Electronic Grammar Checking
The next talk in the
ICLT lecture series will be given by Dr. Bettina Harriehausen-Mühlbauer. The title of her 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.
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