FACULTY

Biography

Graeme Hirst’s research interests cover a range of topics in computational linguistics, natural language processing, and related areas of cognitive science including lexical semantics, the resolution of ambiguity in text, the preservation of author’s style in machine translation, recovering from misunderstanding and non-understanding in human-computer communication, and linguistic constraints on knowledge-representation systems. His present research includes the problem of near-synonymy in lexical choice in language generation; computer assistance for collaborative writing; and applications of lexical chaining as an indicator of semantic distance in texts. A recent spin-off of this research is an intelligent spelling checker. Professor Hirst was a member of the Waterloo-Toronto HealthDoc project, which aimed at building intelligent systems for the creation and customization of healthcare documents, and is presently a member of the BUL-sponsored EpoCare project that seeks to answer clinical questions for physicians from clinical-evidence publications. He was the founding editor of Canadian Artificial Intelligence, and is on the editorial boards of Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics. He is the author of two monographs: Anaphora in Natural Language Understanding (Springer-Verlag, 1981) and Semantic Interpretation and the Resolution of Ambiguity (Cambridge University Press, 1987). He is the recipient of two awards for excellence in teaching, and a best-paper award at the AAAI-84 conference. He has supervised more than 35 theses and dissertations, four of which have been published as books. Until August 1, 2006, Professor Hirst is on a research leave at the Center for Spoken Language Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Keywords
Computational linguistics, natural language processing, computer assistance for collaborative writing, style in language, question-answering, information extraction, lexical semantics, semantic distance, word prediction.