computer science
OPENS DOORS
Associate Professor
| Room | Owheo Building, Room 2.54 |
| Phone | +64 3 479 8299 |
| alik@cs.otago.ac.nz |
My background is in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. I studied psychology and philosophy at Oxford University, and then took an MSc and PhD in artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, which I completed in 1995. My post-doctoral work has also been in Edinburgh, and I arrived in Otago in November 1998.
My main research interest is in computational linguistics; in particular in theories of discourse structure and natural language generation. The kind of questions I think about are:
What makes a text like this one 'hang together'?Why does it sound strange if you mix the sentences up in a random order?
What would you need to tell a computer to get it to create a text like this one from a database of facts?
One of the things you need to know when you're writing a text is who the reader is. If I knew you were a linguist, I'd go on to say I'm interested in semantics, especially dynamic semantics and the semantics of generics. If I knew you were an industrial sponsor, I'd tell you I'm involved in building text generation systems that run on the web, producing hypertext pages tailored to individual users.
Selected Publications
A KnottSensorimotor cognition and natural language syntax
Book Draft
A Knott and P Vlugter
Multi-agent human-machine dialogue: issues in dialogue management and referring expression semantics.
Artificial Intelligence 172:69-102 (2008)
B Webber, M Stone, A Joshi and A Knott
Anaphora and discourse structure
Computational Linguistics 29(4):589-637 (2003).
A Knott
A Data-Driven Methodology for Motivating a Set of Coherence Relations
PhD thesis, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh (1996)
