1 Chair of Language Technology

2 Outline General information Staff Teaching –Courses –Supervision Research –Fields –Main results –Participation in conferences –Organizing of schools/workshops Future plans

3 General information Chair was opened Co-operation with the linguists of the University of Tartu since 1980s –Informal research group of computational linguistics (head Professor of General Linguistics Haldur Õim) –Research theme Computational and language resources for Estonian: theoretical and applicational aspects –Teaching courses of language technology/computational linguistics

4 Staff Mare Koit (cand. math.) – professor Tiit Roosmaa (cand. techn.) – associate professor Heli Uibo, MSc – lecturer Kaili Müürisep, PhD – researcher

5 Teaching 33 courses MTAT.06. … Some courses –Language technology –Artificial intelligence I, II –Introduction to computational linguistics –Mathematics for computational linguists I, II Heli – computer handling, programming, object oriented programming (MTAT.03); computational morphology (FLEE.08)

6 Teaching (2) Courses of visiting lecturers (partly supported by Estonian Tiger University) 2003 Tatjana Gavrilova (S. Petersburg). Introduction to Knowledge Engineering Graham Wilcock (Helsinki), Kristiina Jokinen (Helsinki). XML-based Natural Language Generation Vadim Stefanyuk (Moscow). Lisp, Symbolic Programming Language 2004 Graham Wilcock. Vadim Stefanyuk. Lisp and Artificial Intelligence Martin Volk (Stockholm), Karin Harbusch (Koblenz). Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing 2005 Yorick Wilks (Sheffield). Human-Computer Dialogue Processing, February Norbert Fuchs (Zurich). Attempto Controlled English, November 7-11

7 Teaching (3) Graduate students can participate in the courses of Nordic Graduate School of Language Technology (NGSLT) –Agreement concerning collaboration with the NGSLT between NGSLT and University of Tartu was signed Estonian Graduate School of Linguistics and Language Technology ( ) –offers courses, supports mobility of graduate students and visiting lecturers

8 Teaching (4) Theses defended since – 1 PhD (Tiina Puolakainen, 2001) – 3 MSc (Kaarel Kaljurand, Margus Treumuth, Andrei Ivanov) – 1 MA (Liina Eskor – FLEE) –16 BSc (4 years) – 1 BA (4 years) – 4 BSc (3 years) – 2 diploma theses Under supervision –6 PhD theses (Heli Uibo, Kaarel Kaljurand, Margus Treumuth, Liina Eskor, Maret Valdisoo, Evely Vutt) –4 MSc 4+2 (Aigar Sirel, Aleksei Ivanov, Taavet Kikas, Eva Valk) –1 MA 4+2 (Helen Nigol - FLEE) –2 MSc 3+2 (Pilleriin Mutso, Krista Liin) –1 MA 3+2 (Siiri Pärkson – FLEE)

9 Research 1)Computational morphology of Estonian (Tiit Roosmaa, Heli Uibo) 2)Computational syntax of Estonian (Tiit Roosmaa, Kaili Müürisep, Heli Uibo) 3) Computational semantics (PhD student Kaarel Kaljurand) 4) Dialogue modelling (Mare Koit)

10 Research (2) (1) Computational morphology Two-level morphology of Estonian (2) Computational syntax Surface syntactic analyser of written Estonian Syntactically annotated text corpus Adaptation of the surface syntactic analyser to spoken Estonian started Estonian treebank started Text summarizer which uses syntactic analysis Experiments of using of functional unification formalism for sentence generation

11 Research (3) (3) Computational semantics Software for word sense disambiguation Term extraction from Estonian texts using semantics and machine learning (4) Dialogue modelling Estonian dialogue corpus Software for processing of dialogue corpus Experiments on automatic recognition of dialogue acts using machine learning started Simple dialogue system implemented

12 Research (4) International projects –Nordic Treebank Network (Heli, Kaili) –PaNoLa-plus (Parsing Nordic Languages) (Heli) –TELRI II (Tiit) –PhD student Kaarel Kaljurand is participating in 2 international projects of the Zurich University Projects of Estonian Science Foundation –2 projects –1 project > (Modelling of conversational agent) National programme Estonian and national culture, language technology projects –2 projects National programme Estonian and national memory, language technology projects –2 projects > (Syntax-based language software and linguistic resources, Information dialogue with computer in Estonian)

13 Research (5) Participating in international conferences, e.g –ACL-04 (Annual Meeting of the Association of Computatioal Linguistics) - Tiit –LREC-04 (International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation) - Tiit –ECAI-04 (European Conference of Artificial Intelligence) - Mare –COLING-04 (International Conference of Computational Linguistics) - Heli –TLT 2004 (Treebanks and Linguistic Theories) - Heli 2005 –ACL-05 - Heli –IJCAI-05 (International Conference of Artificial Intelligence) - Mare, Tiit –NoDaLiDa-05 (Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics) - Heli, Kaili, Mare –RANLP-05 (Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing) - Heli

14 Organizing of schools/workshops 2002 –Summer school Language Technology in Human- Computer Interaction (19 participants: 4 from Russia) 2004 –Summer school Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (22 participants: 4 from Latvia, 2 - Lithuania, 3 - Russia, 4 - Ukraine) –Nordic Treebank Network workshop in Tartu (Heli) 2007: NoDaLiDa in Tartu

15 Future plans Teaching –New courses 2005/06 –Theories and Models of Natural Language Syntax 4 CP (Kaili, Heli) –Syntactic Analyzer 2 CP (Kaili) –Statistical Models of Natural Language 2 CP (Mare)

16 Future plans (2) Research Cooperation in University of Tartu (with department of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics) Cooperation in Estonia (with Tallinn University of Technology and Institute of Estonian Language) –Graduate School of Linguistics and Language Technology –National programme Computer support of Estonian ( ) »Machine translation »Multilingual information retrieval »Information dialogue with computer International cooperation –NGSLT –Nordic Treebank Network activities –New projects? »Multilingual text summarizing (Marie Curie Actions Research Training Networks) »PaNoLa-Baltic – software for teaching (Estonian) syntax (Research Council of Norway under the programme “NORDPLUS neighbour”)