Benjy's Research Interests
Dissertation Work
My dissertation research was in the area of natural language
generation. I developed a system called Kalos that generated parts of
a draft users' guide for a microprocessor from a knowledge base
describing the microprocessor. I focused on two areas: First, I developed
techniques to generate text iteratively using revision processing.
Revision processing works similarly to what we as humans do when we
produce draft text and iteratively revise it. The application of
revision processing to automated text generation helps to reduce the
complexity of individual generation modules by postponing some
decisions for consideration by revision modules.
Second, I worked on developing a uniform knowledge base for natural
language generation with revision. For revision to be applied
efficiently, the revision software must be able to make decisions
based on all sorts of knowledge. In traditional systems, knowledge
for different phases of generation are segregated for efficiency
reasons, but in Kalos, I encoded all the system knowledge using a
uniform representation language to which a single inference technique
could be applied. I also worked on techniques for dealing with the
inefficiency of a large, uniform knowledge base.
PostScript copies of my dissertation and an AAAI-94 article are
available via anonymous ftp:
Other Research Interests
I'm interested in automating processes that are traditionally
difficult to automate, e.g. the automatic generation of machine
simulators from abstract descriptions.
I'm interested in AI information retrieval apprentices. One area of
particular interest is in the tracking of a user's changing areas of
interest over time.
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