Contact:
Alistair Willis,
Department of Computing,
The Open University,
Walton Hall,
Milton Keynes,
MK7 6AA,
UK.
Tel: +44 (0) 1908 652890
Fax: +44 (0) 1908 652140
Mail: A.G.Willis @
open.ac.uk |
Research Interests
I am interested in Natural
Language Processing, and in particular how we can represent and reason
about the meaning of ambiguous sentences. This has led to our work
on nocuous ambiguity,
which arises when different groups of readers interpret the same piece
of text in different ways. I am also interested in how to automatically
identify when stylistically different passages of text have the same
meaning.
Recently, I have been investigating how to apply this research to
applications in software engineering, biological terminology
recognition and automatic marking of student responses in free text. Current Projects
- ViBRANT
(2010-2013): Supporting biodiversity research communities.
The Vibrant project is an FP7
infrastructure grant, led by the Natural
History Museum, for the purpose of supporting biological
taxonomists across Europe. The OU is leading a work package to
investigate the use of automatic markup in scanned biological documents
to assist document search and concept discovery.
- étoile (2011-2013):
Enhanced Technology for Open Intelligent Learning Environments.
Étoile project is a
European Coordination Action grant led by the Open University. The
project aims to build a highly scalable system to provide prospective
Complex Systems PhD students with suitable introductory training in a
range of disciplines, with minimal input from academic staff. The
system requires a combination of learning networks and automatic
assessment.
- MaTREx
(2008-2011): Making Tacit Knowledge in Requirements Explicit.
Investigating Natural Language
Processing techniques to identify where tacit knowledge and ambiguity
in requirements documents might lead to incorrect implementations in
later stages of the software development lifecycle (funded by EPSRC).
PhD Students
I am co-supervising Tom Collins on
"Stochastic Modeling for Computer Music Generation" and Lin Ma on
presupposition analysis, as part of the MaTREx project. Teaching
I am currently joint chair of
M801, the MSc Research Project and Dissertation.
Previously, I was on the production course team for M359, the level 3
module on relational databases, and the presentation teams for M359 and
M450, the Undergraduate Computing Project.
Past Research Interests
From my time at Philips Research,
I am interested in how we can automate the process of testing software.
Software testing is a very interesting area of software engineering
that I think deserves a higher status. I am interested in how we
address the questions:
- How do we measure how good a set of test cases is? Finding
bugs in well written software is harder than finding bugs in buggy
software.
- Given a suitable description of a piece of software, and a
requirement of a certain level of testing, can we automatically
generate a optimal test set
to achieve that level of testing (that is, the smallest set of test
cases that will achieve the required level of coverage)?
Quick Biog
I graduated in physics and
philosophy from Cambridge, then took an MSc in Artificial Intelligence
at Edinburgh, and a DPhil in Computational Linguistics at York.
After leaving York, I worked for Philips Research Laboratories for
about three years on automated software testing before returning to
academia and natural language processing with the Open University.
While working at the Open University, I have studied for a degree
in Law, which I completed in 2009.
Publications
Some representative publications are:
- Hui Yang, Anne De Roeck, Vincenzo Gervasi, Alistair Willis
and Bashar Nuseibeh. Analysing
Anaphoric Ambiguity in Natural Language Requirements. Journal of
Requirements Engineering. Accepted,
forthcoming.
- Collins, Tom; Laney, Robin; Willis, Alistair and
Garthwaite, Paul (2011). Modeling pattern importance in
Chopin's mazurkas. Music Perception, 28(4), pp. 387–414.
- Alistair Willis, David King, David Morse, Anton Dil, Chris
Lyal and Dave Roberts. From XML to XML: The Why and How of Making
the Biodiversity Literature Accessible to Researchers. In
Proceedings of LREC 2010, Malta. 19-21 May, 2010.
- Alistair Willis, Francis Chantree and
Anne De Roeck. Automatic Identification of Nocuous
Ambiguity. Research on Language & Computation 6(4).
Springer. 2008.
- Alistair Willis, NP Coordination in Underspecified Scope
Representations. 7th International Workshop on Computational
Semantics, Tilburg, the Netherlands, January 2007.
- Chantree, Francis; Nuseibeh, Bashar; De
Roeck, Anne and Willis, Alistair
(2006). Identifying nocuous
ambiguities in natural language requirements. In: Proceedings
of 14th IEEE International Requirements Engineering conference (RE'06),
11-15 Sept 2006, Minneapolis/St Paul, Minnesota, USA.
A complete list of publications is available here.
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