Home Page of Francis Chantree

Room MX141,  Computing Department,   The Open University
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, United Kingdom
Tel (office):    +44 (0) 1908-659200
Tel (mobile): +44 (0) 7729 920057
Email: f.j.chantree@open.ac.uk

My Website contains:

I live a lot of the time now in Romania with my ladyfriend. See here my initial impressions of this fascinating country: Romanian Adventure.

Who Am I, and Why?

I have just completed a PhD at the Open University.

I am now 44 years old. I put my eerily youthful appearance down to dance classes, strict adherence to Francis and Avik's Patent Diet©, and a rather naive attitude towards life.

I was born in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, U.K., and I was brought up nearby in the picturesque village of Abbots Langley, which nestles in the armpit of where the M25 meets the M1. I have also lived in London, Sheffield, Edinburgh and (joy of joys!)  Copenhagen.

I like to think of myself as a bit of a linguist. One of my major achievements in life has been to learn Danish, one of the more rubbish-sounding members of the family of Germanic languages. If you want me to learn your stupid language, then make me fall in love with you and take me back to live with you in your stupid country! (Joking)

I am a Christian, and I attend the Water Eaton Church Centre.

My PhD

My PhD is entitled (for the moment at least) Identifying Nocuous Ambiguity in Requirements Documents. "Nocuous" means liable to cause misunderstandings, and "requirements" refers to the branch of engineering which deals with specifying how systems and suchlike are to be built. Ambiguity is pervasive in human language, though not all of it is nocuous. My approach is to find "innocuous" ambiguities, i.e. those that are not likely to cause misunderstandings, and then eliminate these. The user can seek clarification of the meaning of the remaining nocuous ambiguities, and hopefully have them rewritten. The innocuous ambiguities are found using a set of heuristics. These are based on analysis of a large generic corpus, and together they aim to automatically predict human judgements about which ambiguities are nocuous and which are innocuous. We test our method on coordination ambiguities. These are ambiguities found in phrases such as "old men and women will receive tax cuts", where is it unclear whether "old" applies to both the men and the women or just to the men. We have achieved precision approaching 90% when predicting the most common type of innocuous ambiguity.

My supervisors are Anne De Roeck, Bashar Nuseibeh and Alistair Willis who help me and guide me.

 

My Publications

Francis Chantree,"Ambiguity Management in Natural Language Generation", CLUK 2004, Birmingham, U.K., January 2004.

Francis Chantree, Adam Kilgarriff, Anne de Roeck and Alistair Willis, "Disambiguating Coordinations Using Word Distribution Information", RANLP 2005, Borovets, Bulgaria, September 2005.

Francis Chantree, Alistair Willis, Adam Kilgarriff, and Anne de Roeck, "Detecting Dangerous Coordination Ambiguities Using Word Distribution", (to appear in Current Issues in Linguistic Theory: Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, published by John Benjamins).

Francis Chantree, Bashar Nuseibeh, Anne de Roeck and Alistair Willis, "Identifying Nocuous Ambiguities in Requirements Specifications", In Proceedings of 14th IEEE International Requirements Engineering conference (RE'06) Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.A., September 2006.

When I write others, be assured, gentle reader, you will be the first to know.

Education & Employment

A fairly normal schooling with exams, baggy trousers, smoking behind the bike sheds, etc, at Langleybury School - long since closed down due to lack of interest - whose most famous alumnus is probably Vinnie Jones.

BSc (computing, maths and Homeric studies) at the Good Old Open University from 1988-1997.

Msc (artificial intelligence) at Edinburgh University 1998-1999.

I have worked as a computer operator, a computer programmer, and a technical writer. The last of these was with a Danish company Digiquant -  who I cannot recommend to you too highly - producing Internet billing software. Other less vocational roles in which I have found myself have been strawberry picker, cleaner, fast food operative, and cycle courier.

If you think that you might want to offer me a job, click here first: Curriculum Vitae

Hobbies

I have been mad for dance! Dances from the former Soviet countries with the Balalaika Dance Group, Laban dance with The Laban Guild, Expressionist dance with Hilde Holger (the centenary of her birth is celebrated this year!), mime, and  flamenco with the wonderful Elisabeth Morch in Copenhagen =>

I have also trained capoeira (a Brazilian martial art) for several years with the also wonderful London School of Capoeira. I trained some Okinawan Kung Fu with Leo Armstead in Fenny Stratford (no website for this yet, contact me for details, it's a great class) and a fascinating Norwegian martial art called stav.

Allow me to inflict my musical tastes upon you:

 

And what about literature? Everybody likes a good book, so here are a few of my favourite authors, pretentious middle-class ponce that I am:

Other Stuff

You really should read about Ambiguity. Go on, you know you want to!

Here at the Open University we are often given valuable advice about how to go about our PhD studies. However, I have spotted some gaps and hereby present my own Rules of PhD Research.

I have received some comments from some eminent people on drafts of the more long-term work that I have been writing. Click here for details.

After reading the adverts in in-flight magazines, I've designed and launched my own range of men's fragrances!

I've just come back from Romania. Had a lovely time, it's a beautiful country. Click to read about my Romanian Adventure!

One of my major ambitions in life has been to create a new universal language - an Esperanto for the 21st Century! Nothing on this yet, but if you want to give me ideas then please do!