Projects
Past Projects
In this project we investigate the application of natural language processing to the domain of art and graphic design. The MBSP shallow parser is adapted in the context of visual communication and integrated in the NodeBox software application.
In this project we study the auditory development, the speech and language acquisition in congenital deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI) implanted during their second year of life. Our aim is to systematically investigate the effect of the CI on different aspects of language and speech development:
The effect of a CI on the auditory level;
The effect of a CI on the articulatory level (the speech);
The effect of a CI on language acquisition and communicative development.
In essence, we...
Cochlear implants have been used since the eighties and by now the technique is well established and implemented all over the world. When the age of implantation is charted out, it appears that children are being implanted at a steadily decreasing age: a few years ago, the youngest subjects that received a CI were around two years of age. Nowadays, children are already implanted around their first birthday, and the youngest subjects that have recently been implanted at the University of Antwerp...
METIS aims at the development of techniques for bootstrapping Machine Translation on the basis of (linguistically annotated) monolingual corpora. CLiPS is a subcontractor of CCL (Leuven) in this project, and provides shallow parsing technology for English and Dutch for this project, in cooperation with the ILK research group of Tilburg University.
The project aims at processing the morphological part of the Goeman - Taeldeman corpus. In June 2005, the first volume of the MAND was published. Topics: pluralisation, diminutivisation and gender.
MUSA aims at the creation of a multimodal multilingual system that converts audio streams into text transcriptions, translates the transcriptions in other languages and then generates subtitles from these translated transcriptions. MUSA will operate in English, French and Greek. A state-of-the-art Speech Recognition system will be enhanced and improved to meet the project settings. An innovative Machine Translation scenario will be designed that combines a Machine Translation engine with a...
The main goal of CLiPS for this project is the application and adaptation of shallow parsing technology for (i) extraction of lexons (ontological relations) from unstructured and semi-structured sources, (ii) evaluation of ontologies, and (iii) adaptation of ontologies (e.g. WordNet) to specific domains. A secondary goal is to investigate the use of ontologies to improve text analysis using shallow parsing.
By analysing the availability of various resources needed for Dutch Language and Speech Technology, priority was assigned to the development of those missing resources that are known to be vital for various types of applications and at the same time can be developed in the current state of the art. The priority lists were submitted to the Dutch Language Union Platform for Language and Speech Technology.
The aim of this project is the study of reduction phenomena in spontaneous (= non-read) Standard Dutch. We use speech from the Spoken Dutch Corpus (Corpus Gesproken Nederlands) and speech collected for the VNC-project Variation in the pronunciation of Standard Dutch. A more specific aim is to compare the pronunciation of highly educated speakers without linguistic training with the pronunciation of teachers of Dutch, who are often considered to be prototypical speakers of Standard Dutch. This...
Goal of the project is to confront and integrate deductive and inductive approaches to computational linguistics in the area of lexical semantics. Subprojects include the combination of supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods for semantic knowledge acquisition and disambiguation, the incorporation of linguistic semantic knowledge in inductive approaches, and the refinement of existing semantic tag sets with machine learning techniques.
Information Extraction (IE) is concerned with extracting relevant data from a collection of documents. During the past decade, several IE systems were developed for corpora of (semi-) structured or even unstructured texts. Those systems were trained using annotated corpora. Annotated data, however, are expensive and difficult to obtain in real-life applications. Therefore in this project we focus on the development of IE systems using semi-supervised learning. For this, we use a small (easy to...
This project studies schwa epenthesis in spontaneously spoken Standard Dutch in Flanders and The Netherlands. The focus is on the duration of the inserted schwas.
Coreference resolution is a key ingredient for the automatic interpretation of text. It has been studied mainly from a linguistic perspective, with an emphasis on establishing potential antecedents for pronouns. Practical applications, such as Information Extraction (IE), summarization and Question Answering (QA), require accurate identification of coreference relations between noun phrases in general. Computational systems for assigning such relations automatically, require the availability of...
The aim of the project is to perform empirical investigations to determine whether adequate prosody can be generated on the basis of two methods that have recently shown success in other language processing domains: (a) robust analysis of text by analyses and metrics from information retrieval and information extraction, and (b) advanced machine learning systems and meta learners.
This project investigates the potential integration of two Artificial Intelligence domains by investigating the problematic role of syntax within both lines of research. Syntactic research within the subfield of Memory Based Reasoning is concerned with optimising two classification tasks: classification of segmentation (delimiting constituents) and classification of disambiguation (assigning grammatical labels).The robotic experiments that are being conducted within the Origins of Language...
The two national varieties of Dutch, spoken resp. in the Netherlands and Belgium, differ in a considerable number of features. Phonetic differences are among the most stable ones.
This project has three distinct aims:
the collection of data representative of speech in the two countries
description of the phonetic variation
evaluation of the variation.
The analysis will be carried out beyond the traditional limitations of the segmental level, and will encompass both auditive and acoustic...
