Please note that this is no longer my current homepage, which can be found at http://purl.org/net/pietsch/!

Christian Pietsch [piːtʃ]

Past

You can find evidence of my past in Saarbrücken where I studied computational linguistics and worked as a research assistant at DFKI (German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence). DFKI is also the place where I wrote my Diplom thesis (Master's thesis) under the careful, patient, and dedicated guidance of Dr. Tilman Becker. In 2005 I graduated and received a pretty rare degree called “Diplom-Linguist (Computerlinguistik)” or Dipl.-Ling. for short.
Before my time in the Saarland, I spent two years studying general linguistics and informatics at Leipzig University, Saxony, and one year studying artificial intelligence and linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Before coming here, I briefly worked as a spam hunter (programming in Java).
When I came to the Open University, I initially contributed to a natural language query interface for Project Halo (funded by Vulcan, Inc). I also participated in the Semantic Mining Network of Excellence (funded by the EU FP 6). OK, here is the full name: Semantic Interoperability and Data Mining in Biomedicine.

Present

Since February 2006, I have been working in Donia Scott's Natural Language Generation group which is part of the Centre for Research in Computing of the Open University. Information about me as an Open University employee, and some publications can be found on the pro forma website that the Faculty of Mathematics and Computing maintains for me.

Projects: My current work takes place within the CLEF project (Clinical E-Science Framework, funded by the MRC), and is known as the CAKE project. It is about applying Conceptual Authoring to information extraction results from medical narratives.
Voluntary work: Together with my colleague Paul Piwek, I am a webmaster of the ACL SIGSEM website. Locally, I look after the NLG group website for which I have programmed a minimalistic CMS in PHP (the graphics design is by my colleague Clara Mancini).
Memberships: Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL SIGGEN (student board member 2009–2010), ACL SIGSEM, ACL SIGWAC
Research interests: NLP & AI, esp. natural language generation (of course), machine translation, avoiding machine translation by multilingual document generation, using the Internet as corpus (and for other purposes), re-usable NLP modules, conceptual authoring, rich internet application generation (RIA), marrying the Semantic Web with NLG technology, textual entailment as a general framework for applied semantics
Recent publications:
- Power, R. and Pietsch, C. (accepted). Editing Medical Data Records with a Natural Language Interface. Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Languages in Biology and Medicine (LBM), Singapore, 6–7 December 2007. [.bib]
- Burek, G., Pietsch, C. and De Roeck, A. (2007). SVO triple based Latent Semantic Analysis for recognising textual entailment. Proceedings of the ACL-PASCAL Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing (WTEP) of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL 2007). 28–29 June 2007, Prague, Czech Republic, pp. 113–118. [.bib] [.pdf]
- Mancini, C., Pietsch, C., and Scott, D. (2007). Visualising Discourse Structure in Interactive Documents. Proceedings of the 11th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG). 17–20 June 2007, Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, pp. 89–92. [.bib] [.pdf]
- Pietsch, C. (2006). Internet as Corpus. Chapter 10 of: Åhlfeldt, H., Borin, L., Daumke, P., Grabar, N., Hallett, C., Hardcastle, D., Kokkinakis, D., Mancini, C., Markó, K., Merkel, M., Pietsch, C., Power, R., Scott, D., Silvervarg, A., Toporowska Gronostaj, M., Williams, S., Willis, A. (2006). Literature review on patient-friendly documentation systems Technical Report 2006/04. Computing Department, The Open University (ISSN 1744-1986), pp. 92–98. [abstract] [BibTeX entry: .bib ] [BibTeX file with all references: .bib] [.pdf]
Contact:
- The permanent URL of this page page is http://purl.org/NET/pietsch (this is what you want to bookmark).
- You are welcome to use Jabber for contacting me: c.pietsch@jabber.workaround.org (no, this isn't an email address).
- Or email me: . Please consider signing or encrypting your email using my OpenPGP key (ID: 7C7C0EFE).
- Telephone +44 (0)1908 652 872. Internal number 52872.
- Centre for Research in Computing
  Computing Department
  The Open University
  Walton Hall
  Milton Keynes
  MK7 6AA

Future

We are working on it.

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