Reasoning about Document Collections

RDC

About RDC

Research
Press Reports
Participants
Publications

Research

This project is no longer active, although the research areas are still relevant for many NLTT projects.

Research in the Reasoning about Document Collections (RDC) project focused on developing computational tools and methodologies for accessing information contained in domain-focused document collections. While current tools recognize what documents are about, RDC worked toward the development of new generations of knowledge-based tools that could interpret the meaning of the documents' content.

RDC explored new techniques for analyzing natural language texts and producing conceptual representations of their content. Their work combined deep parsing techniques for linguistic analysis, language semantics and general and domain-specific knowledge representation and inference. RDC engaged in basic research aimed at solving fundamental problems of symbolic natural language understanding, challenging the conventional wisdom that it is not possible to automatically produce useful representations of document content using symbolic natural language processing (NLP).

This work drew on recent technological advances that are making the use of NLP techniques more commercially feasible. It also drew on the XLE Linguistic Environment a proprietary set of technologies based on PARC's world-class competency in NLP. The RDC research team included computer scientists and linguists with expertise in computational linguistics, symbolic processing of language, mathematical logic, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, and automated reasoning. They explored three key research areas:

natural language understanding
knowledge representation and ontologies
logical foundations for common-sense reasoning

Press Reports

An excerpt from an article, "IT Management: The Future of the IT Organisation" by Andy Favell on ComputerWeekly.com, on July 22, 2003.
An excerpt from an EPS Focus Report which appeared in October 2003.

Participants

Natural Language Theory and Technologies group (NLTT) of the Intelligent Systems Lab (ISL)

Danny Bobrow
Cleo Condoravdi
Lauri Karttunen
Tracy Holloway King
Annie Zaenen
Former members: Dick Crouch, Ron Kaplan, Valeria de Paiva, Reinhard Stolle, John Everett
Former interns: Greg Bronevetsky, Elizabeth Coppock, Aria Haghighi, Guy Isely, Harman Singh, Shawn Sridhar, Anubha Kothari

Selected Publications

Natural Deduction and Context as (Constructive) Modality. 2003. (Valeria de Paiva.) Proceedings Fourth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT-2003), Stanford, California, June 2003. Lecture Notes in AI, Springer. [.pdf]
Entailment, Intensionality and Text Understanding. 2003. (Cleo Condoravdi, Richard Crouch, Valeria de Paiva, Reinhard Stolle, Daniel G. Bobrow.) Proceedings Human Language Technology Conference (HLT-NAACL-2003), Workshop on Text Meaning, Edmonton, Canada, May 2003. [.pdf]
Knowledge Tracking: Answering Implicit Questions. 2003. (Reinhard Stolle, Daniel G. Bobrow, Cleo Condoravdi, Richard Crouch, Valeria de Paiva.) Proceedings AAAI Spring Symposium on New Directions in Question Answering, Stanford, California, March 2003. [.pdf]
Flattened Semantic Representations. 2003. (Daniel G. Bobrow, Cleo Condoravdi, Richard Crouch, Valeria de Paiva and Reinhard Stolle.) Abstract accompanying a talk at the Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop, Stanford, California, March 2003. [.html]
Scalability of redundancy detection in focused document collections. 2002. (Richard Crouch, Cleo Condoravdi, Reinhard Stolle, Tracy King, Valeria de Paiva, John O. Everett and Daniel G. Bobrow.) Proceedings First International Workshop on Scalable Natural Language Understanding (ScaNaLU-2002), Heidelberg, Germany, May 2002. [.pdf]
Finding Similar Documents in Document Collections 2002. (Thorsten Brants and Reinhard Stolle.) Proceedings Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2002), Workshop on Using Semantics for Information Retrieval and Filtering, Las Palmas, Spain, June 2002. [.pdf]
Making ontologies work for resolving redundancies across documents. 2002. (John O. Everett, Daniel G. Bobrow, Reinhard Stolle, Richard Crouch, Valeria de Paiva, Cleo Condoravdi, Martin van den Berg and Livia Polanyi.) Communications of the ACM 45(2):55-60 (2002). [.pdf]
Counting Concepts.2001.(Cleo Condoravdi, Richard Crouch and Martin van den Berg.) Proceedings Thirteenth Amsterdam Colloquium, Robert van Rooy and Martin Stokhof (eds.), pp 67-72. 2001.[.pdf]
Preventing Existence. 2001. (Cleo Condoravdi, Richard Crouch, John O. Everett, Valeria de Paiva, Reinhard Stolle, Martin van den Berg and Daniel G. Bobrow.) Proceedings International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS-2001), Ogunquit, Maine, October 2001, pages 162-173. ACM Press, New York. [.pdf]

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