International Research Training Group
Language Technology
&
Cognitive Systems
Saarland University University of Edinburgh
 

Genre and Language Technology

Speaker: Bonnie Webber

Institution: University of Edinburgh

Abstract:

It is well-known that texts differ from each other in many ways, including their topic, the reading level of their intended audience, and their intended purpose. This talk will focus on genre, which can be viewed externally, in terms of the communicative purpose shared by a set of texts, or internally, in terms of features common to texts sharing a communicative purpose.

I will start with a linguistic take on genre, talking about features that have identified as varying between genres, and about groups of features that have been identified as characteristic of particular genres.

I will then move to language technology, motivating both reasons for a direct interest in genre (ie, retrieving texts not only on a particular topic, but also serving a particular purpose) and reasons for an indirect interest in genre (ie, improving performance in tasks such as parsing, question-answering, and sense labelling, by tuning to features of the texts to hand).

Last modified: Fri, May 29, 2009 10:57:04 by

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