Richard Kittredge

(CoGenTex, Inc., USA)

Natural Sublanguages, Controlled Languages, Translation and Generation

Richard Kittredge is founder and President of CoGenTex, Inc., a small business specializing in text generation applications.  He received a Ph.D. in Formal Linguistics and Logic from the University of Pennsylvania in 1969 and served as professor of computational linguistics at the Université de Montréal until 2006.  During 1970-76 he directed the UdeM TAUM project in machine translation, including development of the METEO and AVIATION systems.  In the 1980s and 1990s his research and publications were mainly on sublanguage analysis, and on text generation applied to reports in English and French sublanguages.  He has been a Visiting Scientist at IBM-Japan and at the Australian CSIRO research organization.  

Abstract

Natural sublanguages are linguistic subsystems that arise spontaneously in recurrent situations where humans communicate in limited domains.  With relative clarity of semantics and syntax, they serve as models and reference points in computational linguistics, much as fruit flies serve in genetics research.  We will review some of the lessons learned from past research and applications involving sublanguages of science and technology, and try to extend these insights to current processing applications using statistical methods, including applications involving broader or multiple domains.