Dr Graham WilcockUniversity Lecturer in Language TechnologyAdjunct Professor (dosentti) Department of General Linguistics University of Helsinki 00014 Helsinki, Finland email: graham dot wilcock at helsinki dot fi
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For many years I worked in the European computer industry as a systems software engineer with ICL (International Computers Limited) in England and in Luxembourg. This included VME operating system debugging, EU database support and Unix GUI development, programming in machine code, S3 and C.
My first in-depth experience in language technology was gained on a UK national research project in Japanese-English machine translation at University of Sheffield (1985-89). The partners were ICL, University of Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies and University of Manchester (UMIST) Centre for Computational Linguistics. Incidentally, my first academic publication (COLING-90), based on this project, was published in Helsinki.
I spent the 1990's commuting regularly between England and Japan, as a Senior Research Scientist employed by Sharp Corporation (1989-98). My time was divided between developing machine translation systems at Sharp's Information Systems Laboratories in Nara and doing research in computational linguistics at UMIST in Manchester. During this period I completed my PhD at University of Manchester. My thesis title was Natural Language Generation with Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar.
I've taught at 4 different UK universities as Temporary Lecturer in Linguistics at University of Manchester (UMIST) (1998-9), Tutor in Software Engineering with the Open University (1999-2000), Lecturer in Computer Science at University of Hull Centre for Internet Computing (2000-1), and Lecturer in Translation and Language Engineering at Imperial College London (2004-5).
Since 2001 I've been University Lecturer in Language Technology at University of Helsinki, with one year's leave of absence (2004-5). I am also Adjunct Professor (dosentti).
My main research areas have been machine translation, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), natural language generation, spoken dialogue systems, linguistic annotation, and the Semantic Web. In machine translation, I worked on Japanese-to-English translation systems both in academic projects (COLING-90) and in industry (Sharp Corporation's DUET system).
In HPSG, I developed implementations using ALE and ProFIT (HPSG-96, COLING-96). I also worked on theoretical problems in head-driven generation (COLING-98), contextual background features (CSLI-99), and information structure (CSLI-05). Recently I've worked on an OWL ontology for HPSG (ACL-07).
In natural language generation, I worked with Systemic Functional Grammar for my MSc thesis (1993) and with HPSG for my PhD thesis (1998). I developed an approach to shallow XML-based natural language generation (NLPXML-2001, BalticHLT-05). I was co-organizer of 10th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (Aberdeen, 2005).
In spoken dialogue systems, I worked with my wife Kristiina Jokinen (the Secretary of SIGDIAL) on adaptivity in response generation for the Finnish USIX Interact project (SIGDIAL-01, SIGDIAL-02). We also worked on generation models for spoken dialogues (AAAI-03) and the role of ontologies in dialogue systems (IJCAI-03 workshop). Recently we worked on SCXML as a basis for interactive voice applications and multimodal dialogue systems (BalticHLT-07, W3C-MMI-07).
In linguistic annotation, I was co-organizer of the NLPXML series of workshops, from 2nd Workshop on NLP and XML at COLING-02 to Multi-dimensional Markup in Natural Language Processing at EACL-06. I developed teaching materials (1st UIMA workshop) using open-source Java statistical NLP tools (OpenNLP, Stanford NLP, Apache UIMA). I was co-chair of The Linguistic Annotation Workshop (The LAW) at ACL-07 and was on the program committees for LAW-II and UIMA for NLP at LREC 2008. I am on the program committee for 2nd UIMA@GSCL workshop at GSCL 2009.
In Semantic Web, I worked on ontology verbalization (ISWC2003 workshop). I was co-organizer of Language Technology and the Semantic Web at EACL-03 and RDF and OWL in Language Technology at ACL-04. I worked on integrating theory-specific and theory-neutral ontologies (Protégé-2006) and on natural language parsing using OWL and SWRL (RuleML-2006). I was on the program committees for ISWC 2006, ESWC 2008 and ESWC 2009.
See my publications list. My papers on HPSG are included in the online HPSG bibliography. One of my book chapters has been translated into Chinese.
My book Introduction to Linguistic Annotation and Text Analytics was published in May 2009 by Morgan and Claypool.
I teach the following courses at University of Helsinki. All the courses use web-based learning materials.
I have taught the following courses at Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu, Estonia: