computer science

Conference abstracts (from 2012 onwards)

• A. Knott, L. Szymanski, C. Gorman and M. Takac. Predicative sentences and perceptual mechanisms. Proceedings of the Linguistics Society of New Zealand Conference 2015, Dunedin, New Zealand, p26.
• A. Knott and M. Takac. Training a neural network sentence generator to produce Maori sentences. Proceedings of the Linguistics Society of New Zealand Conference 2015, Dunedin, New Zealand, pp24-25.
• A. Knott: Causative motor actions and the causative alternation. New Zealand Linguistics Society 2013 (Canterbury, NZ).
• A. Knott: An embodied account of the syntactic domain of verbs. 6th Annual Conference on Embodied and Situated Language Processing (ESLP) 2013 (Berlin).
• A. Knott: Chomskyan Minimalism as a vehicle for embodied models of language. 5th Annual Conference on Embodied and Situated Language Processing (ESLP) 2012 (Newcastle, UK).
• M. Takac, L. Benuskova and A Knott: Language learning with meanings as stored sensorimotor sequences: a connectionist model. 5th Annual Conference on Embodied and Situated Language Processing (ESLP) 2012 (Newcastle, UK).

Selected talks

• A Knott and M Takac: A neural network sentence generator: Results from Māori, Slovak and English. Slides for a talk given at the Linguistics Society of New Zealand Conference, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2015.
• A Knott: An embodied model of the syntax of causative sentences. Slides for a talk given at the Embodied Cognition workshop, Otago, November 2013.
• A Knott: An embodied account of the syntactic domain of verbs. Slides for a talk given at Embodied and Situated Language Processing (ESLP), Potsdam 2013.
• A Knott: A sensorimotor characterisation of syntax, and its implications for models of language evolution. Slides for a talk given at EVOLANG 2010.
• A Knott: Syntactic structures as traces of sensorimotor event representations. Slides for a talk given at SISSA, Trieste, September 2006.
• A Knott: Syntactic structures as traces of sensorimotor event representations. Slides for a talk given at the Center for Language Technology, Macquarie University, September 2004.

II. Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, Law and Society

Books and Reports

• Knott, A., Hannah, K., Pedreschi, D., Chakraborti, T., Hattotuwa, S., Trotman, A., Baeza-Yates, R., Roy, R., Eyers, D., Morini, V. and Pansanella, V. Responsible AI for Social Media Governance: A proposed collaborative method for studying the effects of social media recommender systems on users. Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (November 2021).
• Zerilli, J., Danaher, J., Maclaurin, J., Gavaghan, J., Knott, A., Liddicoat, J. and Noorman, M. A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence. MIT Press (2021).
• Gavaghan, C., Knott, A. and Maclaurin, J. The impact of Artificial Intelligence on Jobs and Work in New Zealand. Report on Phase 2 of the New Zealand Law Foundation's Artificial Intelligence and Law in New Zealand Project. University of Otago, 2021 (forthcoming).
• Gavaghan, C, Knott, A, Maclaurin, J, Zerilli, J and Liddicoat, J. Government Use of Artificial Intelligence in New Zealand. Report on Phase 1 of the New Zealand Law Foundation's Artificial Intelligence and Law in New Zealand Project. NZ Law Foundation, 2019.

Journal articles

• Knott, A., Sagar, M. and Takac, M. (2021). The ethics of interaction with neurorobotic agents: a case study with BabyX". AI and Ethics https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-021-00076-x .
• Zerilli, J., Knott, A., Maclaurin, J. and Gavaghan, C. (2019). Algorithmic Decision-Making and the Control Problem. Minds and Machines 29:555-578.
• J Liddicoat, C Gavaghan, A Knott, J Maclaurin and J Zerilli. The use of algorithms in the New Zealand public sector. New Zealand Law Journal (2019).
• J Liddicoat, C Gavaghan and A Knott. Beyond the hype. AI and Law: an update. Law Talk 926.
• J Zerilli, A Knott, J Maclaurin and C Gavaghan. Transparency in Algorithmic and Human Decision-Making: Is There a Double Standard? Philosophy and Technology 32:661-683 (2018).

III. Computational Linguistics

PhD Thesis

• A Knott: A Data-Driven Methodology for Motivating a Set of Coherence Relations. PhD thesis, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh (1996).

Edited collections

• J Alexandersson and A Knott (eds): Proceedings of the 7th SigDIAL Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Sydney (2006).
• A Knott and D Estival (eds): Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2003. University of Melbourne (2003).
• A Knott, T Sanders and J Oberlander (eds): special edition of Cognitive Linguistics on Coherence Relations and Connectives: Cognitive Linguistics 12(3) (2001).
• R Schwitter, D Estival, C Paris and A Knott (eds): Proceedings of the 2001 Australasian Natural Language Processing Workshop. Macquarie University, Sydney (2001).
• Knott, A, Oberlander, J, Moore, S and Sanders, T (eds) Levels of Representation in Discourse: International Workshop on Text Representation. University of Edinburgh, UK (1999).

Journal papers

• P Vlugter, A Knott, J McDonald, C Hall: Dialogue-based CALL: a case study on teaching pronouns. Computer-Assisted Language Learning 22(2):115-131 (2009).
• A Knott and P Vlugter: Multi-agent human-machine dialogue: issues in dialogue management and referring expression semantics. Artificial Intelligence 172:69-102 (2008).
• A Knott: Review of 'Coherence in natural language: Data structures and applications', by Florian Wolf and Edward Gibson. Computational Linguistics 33:591--595 (2007).
• L Earnshaw, S Fleming, V Weatherall and A Knott: Analysis of errors made by learners of Mäori in an introductory university course. Journal of Mäori and Pacific Development 5(2):31-47 (2004)
• B Webber, M Stone, A Joshi and A Knott: Anaphora and discourse structure. Computational Linguistics 29(4):589-637 (2003).
• A Knott, T Sanders and J Oberlander: Levels of representation in discourse relations. Cognitive Linguistics 12(3): 197--209 (2001).
• M O'Donnell, C Mellish, J Oberlander and A Knott: ILEX: an architecture for a dynamic hypertext generation system. Natural Language Engineering 7:225--250 (2001).
• A Knott: An Algorithmic Framework for Specifying the Semantics of Discourse Relations. Computational Intelligence 16(4) (2000). (PDF version)
• R Stevenson, A Knott, J Oberlander and S McDonald: Interpreting pronouns and connectives: Interactions among focusing, thematic roles and coherence relations. Language and Cognitive Processes 15(3): 225-262 (2000).
• J Oberlander, M O'Donnell, C Mellish and A Knott: Conversation in the museum: experiments in dynamic hypermedia with the Intelligent Labelling Explorer. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 4: 11-32 (1998).
• R Dale, J Oberlander, M Milosavljevic and A Knott: Integrating Natural Language Generation and Hypertext to Produce Dynamic Documents. Interacting with Computers 11(2): 109-135 (1998). (PDF version)
• A Knott and T Sanders, The Classification of Coherence Relations and their Linguistic Markers: An Exploration of Two Languages. Journal of Pragmatics 30:135-175 (1998). (PDF version)
• A Knott and C Mellish, A Feature-Based Account of the Relations Signalled by Sentence and Clause Connectives. Journal of Language and Speech vol 39 (1996). (PDF version) (Note: the online version of this paper is a draft of the published version; please write to me for offprints if you need the final version.)
• A Knott and R Dale, Using Linguistic Phenomena to Motivate a Set of Coherence Relations. Discourse Processes 18(1): 35-62 (1994). Also available as Technical Report RP-34, Human Communication Research Centre, University of Edinburgh, 1992.

Book chapters

• B Webber, A Knott and A Joshi, Multiple Discourse Connectives in a Lexicalized Grammar for Discourse. In H Bunt, R Muskens and E Thijsse (eds) Computing Meaning, Volume 2, Kluwer Academic Publishers (Studies in Lingusitics and Philosophy Series), 2001, pp229--245.
• A Knott, Semantic and Pragmatic relations and their intended effects. In T Sanders, J Schilperoord and W Spooren (eds) Text representation: linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects, Benjamins, 2001, pp127--151. (PDF version)
• A Knott, J Oberlander, M O'Donnell and C Mellish, Beyond Elaboration: The interaction of relations and focus in coherent text . In T Sanders, J Schilperoord and W Spooren (eds) Text representation: linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects, Benjamins, 2001, pp181--196. (PDF version)
• A Knott and R Dale, Choosing a Set of Rhetorical Relations for Text Generation: A Data-Driven Approach. In M Zock (ed) Trends in Natural Language Generation: an Artificial Intelligence Perspective, Springer Verlag (1996). This paper is an extended version of one presented at the Fourth European Workshop on Natural Language Generation. (PDF version)

Conference and workshop proceedings

• J. McDonald, A. Knott, S. Stein and R. Zeng. An empirically-based tutorial dialogue system: design, implementation and evaluation in a first year health sciences course. In H. Carter, M. Gosper and J. Hedberg (Ed.), Proceedings of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ascilite) Conference: Electric Dreams, (pp. 562-572) 2013.
• J. McDonald, A. Knott and R. Zeng. Free-text input vs menu selection: Exploring the difference with a tutorial dialogue system. In P. Cook and S. Nowson (Eds.), Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA) Workshop, 10, (pp. 97-105) 2012.
• D. Alexander, A. Trotman and A. Knott: Click Log Based Evaluation of Link Discovery. Proceedings of the 16th Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS) 2011.
• J McDonald, A Knott, R Zeng and A Cohen: Learning from student responses: A domain-independent natural language tutor. Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Conference (ALTA) 2011.
• P Vlugter, E Van der Ham and A Knott: Error correction using utterance disambiguation techniques. Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTW), University of Sydney (2006) pp123-130.
• P Vlugter and A Knott: A multi-speaker dialogue system for computer-aided language learning. Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (BRANDIAL), Potsdam (2006) pp18-25.
• N Slabbers and A Knott: A system for generating teaching initiatives in a computer-aided language learning dialogue. Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (DIALOR), Nancy, France (2005).
• M van Schagen and A Knott: Tauira: A tool for acquiring unknown words in a dialogue context. Proceedings of the 2004 Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTW2004), Macquarie University (2004).
• C Lakeland and A Knott: Implementing a lexicalised statistical parser. Proceedings of the 2004 Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTW2004), Macquarie University (2004).
• P Lurcock, P Vlugter and A Knott: A framework for utterance disambiguation in dialogue. Proceedings of the 2004 Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTW2004), Macquarie University (2004, to appear).
• A Knott, I Bayard and P Vlugter: Multi-agent human-machine dialogue: issues in dialogue management and referring expression semantics. In Zhang, C, Guesgen, H and Yeap, W (eds) PRICAI 2004: Trends in Artificial Intelligence. Proceedings of the 8th Pacific Rim Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Springer Verlag, Lecture Notes in AI (pp872--881). A longer version of this paper is available as a technical report (OUCS-2004-05, Dept of Computer Science, University of Otago).
• A Webb, S McCallum and A Knott: Modelling type-denoting concepts and words in a simulation of vocabulary development. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG-5), Leipzig 2004, pp113--114.
• P Vlugter, A Knott and V Weatherall: A human-machine dialogue system for CALL. Proceedings of InSTIL/ICALL 2004: NLP and speech technologies in Advanced Language Learning Systems, Venice 2004, pp215--218.
• A Knott and P Vlugter: Syntactic disambiguation using presupposition resolution. Proceedings of the 2003 Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTW2003), pp98--104.
• S de Jager, N Wright and A Knott: Speaker-independent context update rules for dialogue management. Proceedings of the 4th SIGdial workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Sapporo, Japan, July 2003.
• A Knott, J Moorfield, T Meaney, and L Ng: A human-computer dialogue system for Mäori language learning. Proceedings of the World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications (ED-MEDIA), June 2003. (PDF version)
• S King, A Knott and B McCane: Language-driven nonverbal communication in a bilingual conversational agent. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Animation and Social Agents (CASA), May 2003. (PDF version)
• A Knott and N Wright: A dialogue-based knowledge authoring system for text generation. Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Natural Language Generation in Spoken and Written Dialogue, March 2003, pp71--78. (PDF version)
• A Knott, I Bayard, S de Jager and N Wright: An architecture for bilingual and bidirectional NLP. Proceedings of the 2nd Australasian Natural Language Processing Workshop, Canberra Australia pp63--70, December 2002. (PDF version)
• I Bayard, A Knott and J Moorfield: Syntax and semantics for sentence processing in English and Mäori. Proceedings of the 2nd Australasian Natural Language Processing Workshop, Canberra Australia pp33-40, December 2002. (PDF version)
• S de Jager, A Knott and I Bayard: A DRT-based framework for presuppositions in dialogue management. Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (EDILOG 2002), University of Edinburgh, pp61--68 September 2002. (PDF version)
• A Knott, I Bayard, S de Jager, L Smith, J Moorfield and R O'Keefe: A question-answering system for English and Mäori. Proceedings of the Fifth Biannual Conference on Artificial Neural Networks and Expert Systems (ANNES), University of Otago, November 2001, pp223--228.
• C Lakeland and A Knott: POS tagging in statistical parsing. Proceedings of the 2001 Australasian Natural Language Processing Workshop, Macquarie University, Sydney, April 2001.
• B Webber, Aravind Joshi and Alistair Knott: The Anaphoric Nature of Certain Discourse Connectives. Proceedings of `Making Sense: From Lexeme to Discourse', Groningen, The Netherlands, 2000 (to appear).
• M O'Donnell, A Knott, J Oberlander and C Mellish Optimising text quality in generation from relational databases. Proceedings of the First International Natural Language Generation Conference, Mitzpe Ramon, Israel, June 2000, pp133-140.
• A Knott. Discourse relations as descriptions of an algorithm for perception, action and theorem-proving. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Levels of Representation in Discourse (LORID'99), Edinburgh, Scotland, July 1999, pp150-156. (PDF version)
• B Webber, A Knott, M Stone and A Joshi. What are Little Texts Made of? A Structural and Presuppositional Account using Lexicalised TAG. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Levels of Representation in Discourse (LORID'99), Edinburgh, Scotland, July 1999, pp143-159.
• A Knott: An Algorithmic Framework for Specifying the Semantics of Discourse Relations. Proceedings of PACLING'99, the Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics, Waterloo, Canada, August 1999, pp29-39. (Note: this is a draft of the paper published in Computational Intelligence; see above.)
• B Webber, A Knott, M Stone and A Joshi. Discourse Relations: A Structural and Presuppositional Account using Lexicalised TAG. Proceedings of the 1999 Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, College Park, Maryland, June 1999, pp41-48
• B Webber, A Knott and A Joshi Multiple Discourse Connectives in a Lexicalized Grammar for Discourse. Third International Workshop on Computational Semantics, Tilburg, The Netherlands, January 1999, pp309-325. (Note: this is a draft of the paper in Bunt (ed) Computing Meaning vol II; see above.)
• A Knott, Similarity and Contrast Relations and Inductive Rules. Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers, Montreal, Canada (August 1998). (PDF version)
• C Mellish, A Knott, J Oberlander and M O'Donnell, Experiments using stochastic search for text planning. Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Niagra-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada (August 1998).
• C Mellish, M O'Donnell, J Oberlander and A Knott, An architecture for opportunistic text generation. Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Niagra-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada (August 1998).
• A Knott, M O'Donnell, J Oberlander and C Mellish, Defeasible Rules in Content Selection and Text Structuring. Proceedings of the sixth European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Duisburg, Germany (1997). (PDF version)
• J Oberlander, C Mellish, M O'Donnell and A Knott, Exploring a Gallery with Intelligent Labels. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums, pp153-161. Paris (September 1997).
• A Knott, C Mellish, J Oberlander and M O'Donnell, Sources of Flexibility in Dynamic Hypertext Generation. Proceedings of the eighth international natural language generation workshop, Brighton, UK (1996). (PDF version)
• J Oberlander and A Knott, Issues in Cue Phrase Implicature. Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Computational Implicature, Stanford, CA (1996). (PDF version)
• A Knott, An Empirical Methodology for Determining a Set of Coherence Relations.Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Empirical Methods in Discourse Interpretation and Generation, Stanford, CA (1995). (PDF version)
• A Knott, Using Cue Phrases to Determine a Set of Rhetorical Relations. In O Rambow (ed) Intentionality and Structure in Discourse Relations: Proceedings of the ACL SIGGEN Workshop (1993). (PDF version)

Selected talks

• P Vlugter, E van der Ham and A Knott: Error correction using utterance disambiguation techniques. Slides for a talk given at ALTW, Sydney, December 2006.
• A Knott, P Vlugter, I Bayard and V Weatherall: Kaitito: a system for sentence translation and dialogue-based language-learning. Slides for a talk given at the University of Cambridge Computer Lab, January 2006.
• N Slabbers and A Knott: A system for generating teaching initiatives in a computer-aided language learning dialogue. Slides for a talk given at DIALOR, LORIA Nancy, June 2005.
• M van Schagen and A Knott: Tauira: A tool for acquiring unknown words in a dialogue context. Slides for a talk given at ALTW, Macquarie University, December 2004.
• A Knott: Introduction to Discourse Representation Theory. Slides for a talk given at the Australasian Language Technology Summer School, Melbourne, December 2003.