If only computers could speak ...

The human ability of exchanging world and inner experience using natural language (and something more...) is amazing. What is exactly the meaning that is exchanged? Are really concepts relevant constructs? How far concepts are from natural language? How do we use natural language? Is really syntax the first thing we care of or is rather what we mean that is more relevant to us? Can we convey meaning in syntacally ill-formed sentences?

I am trying to explore the possibility of building a system that has this ability. Maybe if only computers could speak, they would ask why you do it for? I don't know ... for fun maybe? Or to better understand the relation between the world experience and the word experience.

My research interests are therefore in:

• Robust (and shallow) methods for language processing as opposed to monolitic explanatory systems
• Methods for knowledge acquisition from textual collection (acquiring the world experience from texts)

Test workbenchs for models and ideas

• CHAOS, a robust syntactic parser for English and for Italian
• ARTE, a machine learning model for textual entailment recognition