Recent Projects
Mini Bio
My PhD research was in computer science and complexity science, although I also published in web-technologies (and even paleontology!) I have founded, run and sold a high-tech business based on my research and written two technical text-books published by Elsevier.
Natural Language Generation
September 2006
I developed software that bridges the gap between individually written school reports and the obvious and often illogical output generated from statement banks.
Educationalists have a legal obligation to inform parents of the progress of their children. For a high-school teacher who teaches several hundred students each week, writing a detailed set of reports can take literally weeks. Many schools alleviate this burden by licensing software that allows teachers to choose from pre-written statement banks to assemble their reports. Unfortunately the result is almost never fluent, and often shows grammatical and stylistic errors.
My solution to this problem was to build software that understood the grammatical structure of report comments. After analysing hundreds of report statements, it became clear that their underlying semantic structure could be inferred accurately. I proceeded to build software that performs this understanding automatically, then uses well-known grammatical rules to rewrite the statements in fluent and error-free English.
So the software can understand input statements such as "The student has a good basic grasp of historical concepts." and "The student sometimes struggles with his/her homework." and produce a final report that reads "Janine has a good basic grasp of historical concepts, but sometimes struggles with her homework.", correctly choosing a contrastive conjunction ("but") to link the sentences, and dropping the subject noun phrase from the second statement.
As a proof-of-concept extension to this technology I developed the system further to allow the educator to select statements in one language, and have the report generated in another. This would be particularly useful for schools with a high proportion of ESL families.