SALS-SIG Research Seminar

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Vacation Student Report-Backs

This year, Microsoft Research Institute Language Technology Group has been fortunate to have taken on an excellent duo of summer vacation students. They've been working on a number of projects within MRI, and they'll be reporting back on what they've done. Please come along and find out what they've been up to.

CORAL Polyps - COnnecting Reasoning Action and Language: The First Stage

Speaker:

Derek Santibanez

Macquarie University
Date: Friday 27th February 1998
Time: 2:00pm
Place: Seminar Room 357, Department of Computing, Building E6A, Macquarie University.

Abstract

CORAL seeks to integrate ideas from natural language understanding and generation, robotics, and artificial intelligence. The aim is eventually to have a mobile robot escort a visitor around the department building while conversing with him. This report covers the work done on the first demonstration of CORAL. Some initial experiments on the robot will be described. These experiments were successful but not robust enough for the CORAL demonstrator. An alternative CORAL application was designed and built. This is a web application demonstrating the link between a user, a route planner, and a low level dialogue controller.

An algorithm to transliterate English names into Chinese

Speaker:

Stephen Wan

University of Adelaide
Date: Friday 27th February 1998
Time: 2:30pm
Place: Seminar Room 357, Department of Computing, Building E6A, Macquarie University.

Abstract

Representing foreign personal and place names in Chinese has traditionally involved identifying a correspondence between the phonemes of the source language word and a set of Chinese phonemes. The consistency obtained by amateur and professional translators suggests that intuitive heuristics underlie the transliteration procedure. The following describes the formalization of these heuristics into an algorithm, involving elementary mappings of English words to a corresponding Chinese form via phonemes. Implemented in Lisp, this algorithm produces transliterations mimicking known official transliterations such as country names, in some cases producing identical results.

Enquiries: sals@mri.mq.edu.au

Last modified: February, 1998