Details

Seminars 1: Conceptualisation for language production.
Seminar 2: Adapting referring expressions to properties of the task environment
Speaker: Dr. Markus Guhe, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Locations and times

This seminar will take place at the following locations and dates:

• Melbourne (talk 1)
Date: 29th October 2008
Location:Monash University
Contact:Ingrid Zukerman, (ingrid.zukerman@infotech.monash.edu.au

• Adelaide (talk 2)
Date: 3rd November 2008
Location:Flinders University of South Australia
Contact: David Powers, powers@infoeng.flinders.edu.au

• Sydney (talk 3)
Date: 11th November 2008
Location:Macquarie University, Sydney
Contact: Rainer Wasinger, rainer.wasinger@mq.edu.au

Overview

Dr. Guhe received his PhD (2003) in Informatics at the University of Hamburg, and his Masters (1997) in Informatics at the Technical University of Berlin. He is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh and is working on multiple projects, namely, JAST, iMAP, and Embodied Mathematics. He has over 30 published articles, conference papers, and technical notes, including a book and several book chapters. His research interests are mainly in the field of computational cognitive modelling, cognitive models of language, cognitive models of the foundations of mathematics, and cognitive models of affect and emotion. He is a usual technical reviewer for several major journals and conferences including the Artificial Intelligence Journal, the Cognitive Science Conference, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, the International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers, and the Society for Text and Discourse.

Title 1: Conceptualisation for language production.

Focus 1: Conceptualisation is the cognitive task that takes non-linguistic knowledge and generates semantic structures that can be linguistically realised. Thus, it is the mediator between perception and other cognitive faculties and language. As conceptualisation processes cannot be observed directly I use the temporal interleaving of perceptual input and verbal output in an online setting as a means to infer the intervening processes and build a computational cognitive model for the open-ended issue of conceptualisation. The model uses an incremental mode of operation to cope with the dynamics of the online setting, because incremental processes only consider the changes in the input. This means (1) they are very fast and (2) they can produce output before all input, which may be relevant for the correct and complete computation of the corresponding output, is available. It can be achieved by the parallel (cascaded) processing of a sequential information stream. The model’s behaviour is influenced by parameters so that different semantic structures can be generated for the same input. This is the way to compare the model’s behaviour to the behaviour of participants in verbalisation studies, which corroborates the models’ cognitive plausibility.

Title 2: Adapting referring expressions to properties of the task environment

Focus 2: Speakers use referring expressions to identify an object in the environment. To generate a referring expression, features of the intended referent have to be selected that distinguish the object from the other potential referents. Current accounts of referring expressions consider a number of factors that influence the choice of features but ignore the influences of the task environment. In particular, they do not address how these influences change the generation of referring expressions over an extended period of time. I will present results of how colour terms are used to describe landmarks in a task-oriented dialogue (a route communication task) and describe a computational cognitive model of the observed adaptations over time.