FrameNet
The FrameNet project is building a
semantically-rich lexicon of English and a corresponding set of
annotated texts, based on more than 600 semantic frames and 130,000
sentences. Comparable FrameNet projects are underway for Spanish, German,
and other languages. By providing a layered semantic representation of
text, FrameNet delivers a key component of next-generation question
answering, machine translation, and other natural language processing
applications. The FrameNet Web site >>
AQUAINT
Researchers in ICSI's AI Group are participating in a project to study deep inferencing techniques and corpus-based techniques for deriving the conceptual semantics needed to achieve this. This research is a collaboration with Stanford University and the University of Texas at Dallas, and is sponsored by the ARDA AQUAINT Program. Our effort is being intergrated into an ambitious overall program to significantly advance the automated analysis of information.
Semantic Web Services
The Semantic Web is an exciting vision for the evolution of the World
Wide Web. Adding semantics enables structured information to be
interpreted unambiguously. Precise interpretation is a necessary
prerequisite for automatic Web search, discovery, and use. Services are
a particularly important component of the Semantic Web. A semantic
service description language can enable a qualitative advance in the
quality and quantity of e-commerce transactions on the Web. The OWL
Services Coalition, under the guise
of OWL-S, has taken some important first steps in this direction.
The model of actions, processes, and events developed within the NTL
project provides a natural, distributed operational semantics that may
be used for simulation, validation, verification, automated
composition and enactment of OWL-S-described Web services.
NTL
The NTL project of the AI Group works in collaboration with other units on the UC Berkeley campus and elsewhere. It combines basic research in several disciplines with applications to natural language processing
systems. Basic efforts include studies in the computational,
linguistic, neurobiological, and cognitive bases for language and
thought and continues to yield a variety of theoretical and practical
findings.
One ongoing applied effort (called EDU for Even Deeper Understanding)
has been in operation since July 2000, with multi-year funding from
the Klaus Tschira Foundation. A major aspect of this collaboration has been the interational workshops on Scalable Natural Language Understanding Systems (SCANALU).
The NTL
Web site >>
Color, Language, and Thought
In 1978 The World Color Survey (WCS) collected color naming data in 110 unwritten languages from around the world. The ICSI WCS staff (Paul Kay and Richard Cook of ICSI, Terry Regier of University of Chicago) put these data into a single database, available to the scientific community. Several outside laboratories have already used this database for studies.
ICSI WCS personnel, joined in one case by Michael Webster (University of Nevada, Reno), have published several statistical studies, using the WCS database, that establish universal tendencies in color naming (contrary to the claims of some linguistic relativists).
In 2010, a sequel to Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's 1969 book Basic Color Terms was published by CSLI Publications. The new book, World Color Survey, is authored by Paul Kay, Brent Berlin, Luisa Maffi, William R. Merrifield, and Richard S. Cook. It presents a detailed analysis of the color systems of the 110 unwritten languages studied by the WCS.
A collaboration of Aubrey Gilbert and Richard Ivry of the UC Berkeley Psychology Department with Regier and Kay has demonstrated Whorfian effects in color discrimination lateralized to the right visual field. The right visual field projects to the left cerebral (or "language") hemisphere. Subsequent experiments revealed the lateralized Whorfian effect in a second lexical domain. Follow-up studies, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Surrey led by Anna Franklin and I.R.L. Davies, have shown that infants have lateralized categorical perception for color in the left visual field, and that for toddlers the visual field yielding a relative advantage for cross-category discriminations of color changes from left to right with the acquisition of color terms. Future lateralization studies of color, other lexical domains, and other languages are planned.
Regier, Kay, and Naveen Khetarpal of the University of Chicago have completed a study, based on the WCS database, demonstrating that color naming across languages reflects near-optimal partitions of the irregular surface of perceptual color space. Further optimization studies of color naming are planned, using different color order systems and more complex and realistic models of the evolution of color naming systems. The optimization model shows promise of explaining systematic variation across color naming systems, as well as universal tendencies. The same ideas have recently also been applied to spatial terms in several unrelated languages.
More about the AI
Research Group >>
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