Jenny Lee Building, Walton Hall Campus, The Open University, taken by Sandra Williams, January 2010

Dr Sandra Williams

Postdoctoral Researcher in Natural Language Generation

I am a member of the Natural Language Generation (NLG) research group.

Research interests

  • Computer-generation of numerical quantity expressions. Numerical quantities are often presented poorly (especially in the media) which frustrates numerate people who are not given enough information while at the same time it perplexes innumerate people who do not understand basic mathematical concepts. I believe that it is possible to vary descriptions of numerical quantities to suit different audiences, situations and writing styles. I recently completed an ESRC Small Project, NumGen, to investigate feasibility and potential areas for future research. I am currently seeking opportunities for follow-up project proposals and would be particularly keen to collaborate with psychologists and maths teachers.
  • Rendering the semantic web accessible to people who want to create or modify semantic content but do not know ontology languages and logics. My role in the SWAT project is to provide natural language support with NLG technology. Currently I am attempting to generate summaries of existing web ontologies.
  • Computer-generation of scripts for medical dramas acted by embodied agents. These short dramas present personalised medical information to patients.

Other interests are discourse structure and microplanning, generation for people with limited literacy, discourse analysis, speech act analysis, intonation analysis, generation of prosodically-annotated text, dialogue management in spoken language systems and automatic text summarisation.

Education

  • Ph.D. Natural Language Generation (NLG) of discourse relations for different reading levels. University of Aberdeen, 2004
  • M.Phil. Computer Speech and Language Processing. University of Cambridge, 1991
  • B.A. (Hons.) Artificial Intelligence and Computing. University of Sussex, 1985

Projects

Current

Past

Ph.D. Students

  • Tu Anh Nguyen (co-supervisor)

Grants and Awards

  • 2008 ESRC Small Grant, £70,000, Generating Intelligent Descriptions of Numerical Quantities for People with Different Levels of Numeracy (NumGen). ESRC Ref. RES-000-22-2760
  • 2000 EPSRC PhD Studentship, Aberdeen University.
  • 1999 DTI SMART Award, £40,000, Speech and Language Technology for Basic Skills Training Applications (jointly with C. Webb, CTAD Ltd.)
  • 1998 Small Research Grant, AU$7,000, Macquarie University, Prosodic Annotation of a Corpus of Route Descriptions.
  • 1990 British Telecommunications Training Award, for MPhil at the University of Cambridge

Programme Committees and Journal Reviews

  • EACL 2009 12th European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Athens.
  • Transactions on Information Systems The official journal of the ACM.
  • INLG 2008 5th International Natural Language Generation Conference, Ohio.
  • ICL 2008 Interactive Computer Aided Learning, Special Track on Computer-based Knowledge & Skill Assessment and Feedback, Villach.
  • RANLP 2007 International Conference on Recent Advances in NLP, Borovets.
  • JoLLi Journal of Logic, Language and Information, Special Issue on Coherence in Dialogue and Generation, 16:4, 2007.
  • ESSLLI 2006 18th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, Malaga. COLING 2002 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Taipei.
  • ACL/EACL 1997 Association for Computational Linguistics, Madrid.

Invited Talks

  • 2009 Seminar at Macquarie University, Computing Department.
  • 2008 Seminar at Aberdeen University, Computing Department.
  • 2007 Seminar at National Informatics Institute, Tokyo, Japan.
  • 2005 Seminar at Aberdeen University, Centre for Linguistics Research.
  • 2002 Seminar at Monash University, Computer Science Department.
  • 2002 Seminar at Stirling University, English Studies Department.

Publications

( See a Word Cloud produced by Wordle from the abstracts of my publications 2007 - 2009. I got the idea from Noémie Elhadad's home page )

2009

  • Richard Power and Sandra Williams [in preparation] Generating numerical approximations.

  • Sandra Williams and Richard Power [in preparation] Hedging and rounding in numerical expressions.

  • Sandra Williams and Richard Power [2009] Precision and mathematical form in first and subsequent mentions of numerical facts and their relation to document structure. Proceedings of 12th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Athens, March 30th - 31st. pdf (39KB)

2008

  • Sandra Williams and Ehud Reiter [2008]. Generating basic skills reports for low-skilled readers. Journal of Natural Language Engineering, Vol. 14, Issue 4, pp. 495-525.

  • Sandra Williams and Ehud Reiter [2008] SkillSum: basic skills screening with personalised, computer-generated feedback. Interactive Computer Aided Learning (ICL 2008), Special Track on Computer-based Knowledge & Skill Assessment and Feedback in Learning Settings (CAF 2008), September 2008, pages 1-8. pdf (366KB)

  • Sandra Williams and Richard Power [2008] Deriving rhetorical complexity data from the RST-DT Corpus. Proceedings of the 6th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2008), Marrakech, Morocco, 28-30 May, 2008. pdf (520KB). Additional data in fig. 3 of our poster pdf (101KB)

  • Sandra Williams, Richard Power and Paul Piwek [2008] Simulating emotional reactions in medical dramas. Proceedings of the Symposium on Affective Language in Human and Machine, Volume 2, The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB 2008) Convention: Communication, Interaction and Social Intelligence, Aberdeen, April 2008, pp. 25-32. pdf (215KB)

  • Ehud Reiter and Sandra Williams [2008] Three Approaches to Generating Texts in Different Styles. Proceedings of the Symposium on Style in text: creative generation and identification of authorship, Volume 7, The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB 2008) Convention: Communication, Interaction and Social Intelligence, Aberdeen, April 2008, pp. 26-33. pdf (190KB)

2007

  • Sandra Williams, Paul Piwek and Richard Power [2007] Generating monologue and dialogue to present personalised medical information to patients. Proceedings of the 11th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG'07), pp. 167-170. pdf (401KB)

2006

  • Paul Piwek, Richard Power and Sandra Williams [2006]. Generating scripts for personalised medical dialogues for patients. Technical Report 2006/06. Computing Department, The Open University. ISSN 1744-1986. pdf (87KB)

  • 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 no. 2006/04. Department of Computing, Faculty of Mathematics and Computing, The Open University. ISSN 1744-1986. pdf (706KB)

2005

2004

  • Sandra Williams and Ehud Reiter [2004] Reading errors made by skilled and unskilled readers: evaluating a system that generates reports for people with poor literacy. Poster at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse, Chicago. poster pdf (327KB), paper pdf (42KB)

  • Sandra Williams and Ehud Reiter [2004] Reading errors made by skilled and unskilled readers: evaluating a system that generates reports for people with poor literacy. University of Aberdeen Department of Computing Science Technical Report AUCS/TR0407, pages 1-6. pdf (123KB)

  • Sandra Williams [2004] Natural Language Generation (NLG) of discourse relations for different reading levels. PhD Thesis, University of Aberdeen.

2003

2002

1990s

  • Sandra Williams and Catherine I. Watson [1999] A Profile of the Discourse and Intonational Structures of Route Descriptions. Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, Eurospeech'99, September 5-9, 1999, Budapest, Hungary, Volume 4, pp. 1659-1662. pdf (43KB)

  • Sandra Williams [1998] Generating Pitch Accents in a Concept-To-Speech System Using a Knowledge Base. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, ICSLP'98), Volume 4, pp. 1159-1162, Sydney, Australia, 30th November - 4th December 1998. pdf (126KB)

  • Robert Dale, Stephen Green, Maria Milosavljevic, Cécile Paris, Cornelia Verspoor and Sandra Williams [1998] Dynamic Document Delivery: Generating Natural Language Texts on Demand. 9th International Conference and Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications. August 24-28, Vienna, Austria. pdf (325KB)

  • Robert Dale, Stephen Green, Maria Milosavljevic, Cécile Paris, Cornelia Verspoor and Sandra Williams [1998] Using Natural Language Generation Techniques to Produce Virtual Documents. Proceedings of the Third Australian Document Computing Symposium, August 21st, Sydney, Australia. pdf (477KB)

  • Robert Dale, Stephen Green, Maria Milosavljevic, Cécile Paris, Cornelia Verspoor and Sandra Williams [1998] The Realities of Generating Natural Language from Databases. 11th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 12-17 July, Brisbane, Australia. pdf (444KB)

  • Cornelia Verspoor, Robert Dale, Stephen Green, Maria Milosavljevic, Cécile Paris, and Sandra Williams [1998] Intelligent Agents for Information Presentation: Dynamic Description of Knowledge Base Objects. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Intelligent Agent on the Internet and Web, Mexico City, Mexico, 16-20 March 1998, pp. 75-86. pdf (404KB)

  • Sandra Williams, Mark Harvey and Keith Preston [1996] Rule-based reference resolution for unrestricted text using part-of-speech tagging and noun phrase parsing. Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium (DAARC), Lancaster, U.K., July 1996 pdf (93KB)

  • Sandra Williams [1996] Anaphoric reference and ellipsis resolution in a telephone-based spoken language system for accessing email. Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium (DAARC), Lancaster, U.K., July 1996. Also in Simon Botley and Anthony McEnery (eds.) Corpus-based and Computational Approaches to Discourse Anaphora, John Benjamins Publishing Company, ISBN 902722272X, 2000. pdf (73KB)

  • Sandra Williams [1996] Dialogue management in a mixed-initiative, cooperative, spoken language system. 11th Twente Workshop on Language Technology (TWLT11) Dialogue Management in Natural Language Systems, Enschade, Netherlands, June 1996 pdf (101KB)

  • Peter Wyard, Alison Simons, Steve Appleby, Edward Kaneen, Sandra Williams and Keith Preston [1996] Spoken Language Systems. BT Technology Journal, January 1996. pdf (444KB)

  • Peter Wyard, Steven Appleby, Edward Kaneen, Sandra Williams and Keith Preston [1995] A Combined Speech and Visual Interface to the BT Business Catalogue. ESCA Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems, 30th May - 2nd June 1995

  • Keith Preston and Sandra Williams [1994] Managing the Information Overload. Physics in Business, Institute of Physics, June 1994 pdf (20KB)