rdale

Username: rdale

Participant details

	Network Member	Robert Dale
	Organisation/Institution	Macquarie University
	Department/Centre	Department of Computing
	Lab	Centre for Language Technology
	Website	http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/~rdale/
	Research area	Natural Language Processing
	Research keywords	natural language generation, language technology, spoken language dialog systems

Research Interests

My research interests are in the areas of natural language generation, spoken language dialogue systems, and information extraction. In all of these areas my recent work has focussed on the development of practical techniques that can provide working language technology arterfacts; in each case, however, the pragmatically focussed work has been carried out with an eye to more general theoretical issues. So, I've long been interested in the phenomenon of reference from both a philosophical and a computational perspective, and more generally in the questions that arise when we consider machines using language, an intrinsically human capability. Does it make sense to try to make machines behave like humans in their use of language? Do, for example, theories of human-human dialogue make any sense when applied to human-machine contexts? I also have a long standing interest in publishing, graphic design and typography, and particularly in the notion that aspects of the rendering of a text have an impact on the meaning it carries, and so should be taken account of in applications that attempt to handle language.