Research
My research focuses mainly within the field of Natual
Language Learning. More specifically, my PhD will look at
developing techniques for efficient and accurate grammar
induction systems. My supervisor is Eric
Atwell.
Previous work looked at employing clustering techniques
for unsupervised learning of parts-of-speech. I was
fortunate enough to have collaborated with John Elliott
- who is a well established researcher in unsupervised
language learning.
I've recently become very interested in Arabic computional linguistics. I've developed a couple of
tools, including aConCorde, an Arabic concordancer, and a program for converting between Buckwalter transliteration
system and Unicode. I'm interested in standard CL tools like stemmers, taggers and parsers too.
Publications
2005
Al-Sulaiti, Latifa, Roberts Andrew and Atwell, Eric.
The use of Corpora and Concordance in the Teaching of Contempory Arabic.
Proceedings of EuroCALL 2005, Cracow, Poland.
(forthcoming)
Roberts, Andrew, Al-Sulaiti, Latifa and Atwell, Eric.
aConCorde: Towards a Proper Concordance of Arabic
Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2005 Conference, Birmingham, UK.
Abu Shawar, Bayan, Atwell, Eric and Roberts, Andrew.
FAQChat as an Information Retrieval System
In: Vetulani, Zygmunt (ed.) Human Language Technologies as a Challenge. Proceedings of the 2nd Language and Technology Conference, Wydawnictwo Poznanskie, Poznan, Poland, pp.274-278. 2005
2004
van Zaanen, Menno; Roberts,
Andrew and Atwell, Eric.
A Multilingual Parallel Parsed
Corpus as Gold Standard for Grammatical Inference
Evaluation
The Amazing Utility of Parallel and Comparable
Corpora Workshop. LREC 2004. Lison, Portugal. pp
58-61, 2004.
2003
Roberts, Andrew
CL2003: the International Conference on Corpus Linguistics.
ELSnews newsletter of the European Language and Speech Network,
vol. 12.2, pp.6-7, 2003
Atwell, Eric; Abu Shawar, Bayan; Babych, Bogdan; Elliott, Debbie; Elliott, John; Gent, Paul; Hartley, Anthony; Hu, Xunlei Rose; Medori, Julia; Oba, Toshifumi; Roberts, Andrew; Scharoff, Serge; Souter, Clive
Corpus Linguistics, Machine Learning and Evaluation: Views from Leeds.
Research Report number 2003.02. School of Computing, University of Leeds, 2003
Roberts, Andrew and Atwell, Eric
The Use of Corpora for Automatic Evaluation of Grammar Inference Systems.
Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2003
Conference, Lancaster, UK. pp 665-661, 2003.
Roberts, Andrew and Atwell, Eric
Unsupervised Grammar Inference Systems for Natural Language.
DRAFT - Submitted to Pattern Review
2002
Roberts, Andrew and Atwell, Eric
Unsupervised Grammar Inference Systems for Natural Language.
Research Report number 2002.20. School of Computing, University of Leeds, 2002
Roberts, Andrew
Automatic Acquisition of Word Classification using Distributional Analysis of Content Words with Respect to Function Words.
School of Computing, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Programmee committees
- Special Session on Evolutionary Grammatical Inference (EGI2005) @ 5th International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications (ISDA2005), Wroclaw, Poland.
Presentations
Others
In my spare time I have been known to submit some articles for technology sites about Linux and Java, amongst other things.
