Seminar: Simplifying Spanish Texts with Computers

Dr. Horacio Saggion (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Thursday, March 27, 2014, 2:45PM, EV 11.119

Abstract

Automatic text simplification (ATS) is a complex task which encompasses a number of operations applied to a text at different linguistic levels. The aim is to turn “complex” textual input into a simplified variant, taking into consideration the specific needs of a particular target user or task.ATS can serve as pre-processing tool for other NLP applications but most importantly it can have a social function, making content accessible to different types of users. ATS has been in the NLP research agenda for a number of years and although some progress has been made in different aspects of the text simplification problem, there are still issues to be resolved. In this presentation, I will discuss the problem of text simplification and report on a number of developments at our laboratory to make textual content in Spanish more accessible.

Bio

Horacio Saggion is a Ramón y Cajal Research Professor at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He is associated to the Natural Language Processing group, where he works on automatic text summarization, text simplification, information extraction, sentiment analysis and related topics. His research is empirical combining symbolic, pattern-based approaches and statistical and machine learning techniques. Before joining Universitat Pompeu Fabra, he worked at the University of Sheffield for a number of UK and European research projects (SOCIS, MUMIS, MUSING, GATE, CUBREPORTER) developing competitive human languagetechnology. He was also an invited researcher at John Hopkins University for a project on multilingual text summarization. Horacio is currently principal investigator in the EU funded projects Dr Inventor and ABLE-TO-INCLUDE and in the Spanish national project SKATER-TALN-UPF. He was previously scientific coordinator of the Simplext project. He has published over 100 works in leading scientific journals, conferences, and books in the field of human language technology. He is co-editor of a book on multilingual, multisource information extraction and summarization recently published by Springer. Horacio is member of the ACL, IEEE, ACM, and SADIO. He is a regular programme committee member for international conferences such as ACL, EACL, COLING, EMNLP, IJCNLP,IJCAI and is an active reviewer for international journals in computer science, information processing, and human language technology.