Digital Humanities? Sure, why not?

So we finally have a first paper written, submitted and accepted about work on the DHBB -- the Brazilian Dictionary of Historical Biographies.

This is going to be presented in Guaruja', pretty soon, in the Workshop on Digital Humanities. This was really fun work to do, analyzing the results of text processing with FreeLing
and thinking of ways of improving the information extraction that we could do. I prefer my original title for the work, but reviewers didn't like it, so it's now

Exploratory Information Extraction from a Historical Dictionary

As is to be expected named entities and their recognition play a main role in this project, as do time expressions recognition and multiword expressions. All interesting stuff.

Maude and Isabelle...

Together with Vivek Nigam I am working on proving textual entailment using the traditional rewriting system Maude.

This is an attempt to redo, with open source software, some of the work done in PARC using the Bridge system. What interests me most is the logic we (the PARC Natural Language Theory and Technology team) devised for this task, because the representations in this logic took several years for linguists to agree on. So Vivek and I are taking the short cut of 'assuming' a perfect NLP system. (even explaining what a perfect NLP system means is already kind of long and full of design choices.)

We have a short note, explaining the project, that is to appear in LFSA 2014 in Brasilia. The note builds up from papers describing TIL (Textual Inference Logic) such as A Basic Logic for Textual Inference, Textual Inference Logic: Take Two and Contexts for Quantification.
The note is called  Towards a Rewriting Framework for Textual Entailment.

What about Isabelle? Well, I've been trying to ask people if we could do a parallel implementation in Isabelle and I hope I have convinced Sara Kalvala to do it with me, yepiie!

( I am a member of the group a researchers at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) the  Language and Natural Reasoning group, the picture is one of the workshops organized by the group, CSLI Workshop on Natural Logic, Proof Theory, and Computational Semantics, 2011)