AutoModel - Processing natural language

Finished Related Work Research

2011-07-14T13:44:00.002+02:00

Today I finally managed summarizing, excavating, and structuring the related work for my dissertation. All in all, it's about 300 references to books, chapter, papers, articles, ...

That was quite a bit of work; though on the other hand no one can say I missed a reference.

Also, the various bits and pieces delivered additional argumentation for some of research goals. This encourages me and my fellow researchers, too.

I guess today's a good day.

Finishing Review Rounds with Professors

2011-04-27T10:29:00.002+02:00

I am about to finish my review rounds with the professor of our faculty. So far, I've had 4 appointments with professors (outside my institute) who were interested in my work. The discussion led to a lot of insight when receiving feedback from a different angle. That really made a difference. I got interesting tips of what and what not to do and how to cope with the latest challenges I am facing in writing/finishing my dissertation.

The current status: All is well and I am on a straight line towards finishing my thesis. For the last leg of the journey I cannot foresee any curvy roads that I might have overlooked; but one never knows, so I am excited but positive that this is the last inning of a long game...

Keep your fingers crossed, I am about to get this thing done in the next couple of months.

Publishing My Work for Internal Review

2011-03-03T11:25:00.002+01:00

I have sent out my PhD thesis (i.e. parts of it) to all faculty members holding a professorship to receive valuable feedback for my final dissertation. So far I have received interesting hints as to what I want to emphasize or focus for the written documentation of my work.

I will certainly not be able to respect or include all suggestions since this is out of the scope of this work. But each and every idea from "outside" leaves another opportunity for the RE research team at our research chair. I will include everything in my thesis, even if it falls into conclusion and outlook for further projects.

The clue is that every professor who wants to see and discuss my work can now invite me for a meeting which I have to attend. I will keep you updates how many invitations I will receive.

Preparing ERC Grant

2011-01-13T16:58:00.002+01:00

We are currently in the process of preparing a research grant for ERC.

The grant is due Feb, 9th and we will be able to provide a very interesting and nifty vision of how to cope with the future of software development.

I will keep you posted on that.

Results, Presentations, and Assessment

2010-11-25T14:23:00.002+01:00

...of past visited conferences.

The slides and papers of the CIKM 2010 and FoSER (FSE) are available now. You can find them here.

A short, brief summary of each conference in a collection of adjectives follows now. I do not want to spend to much time describing the actual conferences, just give you a little idea of what it felt like.

CIKM2010:

Toronto, Canada
Free WiFi everywhere (bus, hotel, ...)
NLP processing software engineers in the information retrieval world: outsiders with a special touch
interesting insights
first poster demo ever; interesting and funny
met a guy from Turkey who studied in Germany and now lives in Finland
spend 95% of my time inside (what was daylight again?)
sweet potato fries (never had that b4!)

ACM SigSoft FoSER/FSE:

Santa Fe
cool, but sunny
met all the people I ever cited in person
not so visionary visionaries after all
large workshop (150ppl.)
hotel bed too soft
nice restaurants
Santa Fe is literally in the middle of nowhere
forgot book on flight (yeah, in that seat pocket in front of me)

So that was just a short, random wrap-up. I might contribute some more once I can think of it.

Now it's back to my dissertation.

Finished Poster for CIKM 2010

2010-10-20T22:31:00.002+02:00

I just finished the poster presentation for CIKM 2010. I will make the poster available for download directly after the conference. You will find it next to the presentation slides and workshop papers at the IPD Tichy website.

Next step: Prepare presentation for FoSER 2010 in Santa Fe and then off to North America.

Presenting our Work Across North America

2010-10-06T17:43:00.004+02:00

I have the pleasure to announce that I will be able/invited to present our work of the last 12 months across North America.

This means I will attend the CIKM2010 in Toronto, Canada at the end of October as well as visit the ACM SigMod/FoSER conference in Santa Fe, USA on Nov, 6th.

Next step is to prepare slides, posters and discussion material for the desired knowledge exchange during these conferences.

I am really looking forward to this trip(s).

About Ontologies, Porn, and the Urge to Have Sex

2010-09-14T18:29:00.005+02:00

Yeah,

quite an interesting headline I chose today. But as a matter of fact, I have reason to do so.

Today, I was surfing around, preparing slides and notes for a lecture when I came by the guys from OpenMind. Usually I don't pay much attention to the statements which people give the machine to learn. These statements are shown on the

right hand side (see "vote on these statements") and give assertions that humans made. Then the reader is supposed to rectify these statements or to verify their meaning.

Well ... today, I found this on the page:

And yeah, ... I think it is kind of funny. Here, the big question about semantics vs. syntax arises again. Could we all agree with the statement I marked in the red rectangle? Or is this just a generalization that does not apply to the majority of the people? And if so ... do I vote this statement true, half-true or not true at all? Hmmm, tough one. I let you decide on your own.

So check it out on the site (see link above) and help the guys from MIT improve their database of common sense. As you've seen today, there's always time for a little chuckle during the hard work of verifying natural language statements and their relation towards each other.

So long, that's it from me today.

Back from NLDB 2010, Cardiff University

2010-06-29T13:35:00.004+02:00

Got back from NLDB 2010 in Cardiff two days ago.
The conference was very well organized and the talks (as always) reached from very good to extremely poor.
Just to give you some examples:

one guy managed to talk 32minutes on 39 slides though the time cap was supposedly 15mins for every speaker
one guy literally (and figuratively) read his slides which weren't actually slides. They were some kind of script we he presented. Kind of a book reading. I do have to admin though, that his presentation still was kind of interesting
two ladies spoke so loud during the presentations, we only knew they already started their resp. talks because we could see their lips moving
one guy showed up at 09:47am for his 09:30 - 09:45 presentation. He kind of had a good excuse and was pouring sweat all over his body, poor bastard
one guy did not manage to get the projector to work with his laptop, therefore he rebooted with the laptop hooked up to it. Then he punched in his password into the "user" field of his Suse linux OS. Well, we all know the name of his wife now
one guy had a screen saver with (somewhat embarrassing) private pictures which ran for 2 minutes on the big screen before he realized he had just talked too long on the slide and that the screen saver already kicked in. Funny

As you might be able to tell, I had a great time and think my/our presentation went well. I met a couple of very interesting researchers and we found some common ground for research collaboration. Also, Germany won the game in a pub full of English. Not bad either.
And the hotel (Radisson BLU) was centrally located and pretty nice.

You can get the presentation here.

So long. That's my short report from NLDB.

Just Got a Journal Article and Conference Paper Published

2010-04-21T14:25:00.003+02:00

As we were working hard on the last publications, we are happy to announce the official release of two of our documents.
One will be published in the proceedings of the NLDB2010 conference in Cardiff, Wales, UK and you can pre-read it here.
The other is a journal article which was released by WorldPress in the International Journal of Semantic Computing. This article can be found here and here.

Have fun reading through it.

FYI: We are still waiting for two more reviews to conferences which we want to provide papers for.

Paper for NLDB Accepted - Going to Cardiff in June

2010-03-25T11:59:00.003+01:00

Our paper for the NLDB 2010 has been accepted. We are now working on the camera ready version which is due in 3 weeks.
So from June, 23rd-26th we'll be in Cardiff, UK presenting the results of our work.

We'll give you a heads up about the other papers we submitted as soon as we get feedback.

Submitted 2 Papers for NLDB2010 and RE2010 conferences

2010-02-24T19:45:00.003+01:00

We submitted 2 more papers in the last couple of days.
Just one more paper left, before we round up the work of the last 4 years into one big and nice dissertation.
Let's hope my mentor sees it the exact same way ;-)

The plan for the next weeks:

Finish research project grant
Finish thesis proposal
Start compiling thesis
Make master thesis students finish
Hand over thesis
Retire and enjoy life in a elderly neighborhood in Florida

So far, so good (once again). I will keep you posted.

Submitting Paper for NLDB

2010-02-03T16:14:00.002+01:00

To our readers: we are currently under full load for the paper deadlines we need to hold in the next couple of weeks.
First deadline will be the NLDB 2010. We plan to submit one paper.
Next deadline is RE 2010. We plan to submit another paper.

All our pieces we worked on for the last couple of months are slowly coming together into one serious tool repository which might end up being the big solution for the new RE approach. We call it RECAA. It stands for "Requirements Engineerings Complete Automization Approach".

After the RE 2010 deadline on Feb, 19th, we plan to focus on the DFG proposal to support our project. That's the next big step into financing our studies for the next couple of years.

Preparing, Sorting and Structuring Contents for Publications

2009-12-16T15:09:00.002+01:00

As of now, I am still writing on my PhD proposal.
Also, the whole RECAA-Team tries to funnel its finding into outlines for possible publications in 2010.

The PhD proposal will be finished this year. It looks like we have 3 to 4 papers in the pipeline coming up. We'll see how that turns out.

If I don't come back here before next week - merry Christmas to everybody!

Writing Thesis Proposal and Thinking about Google Fellowships

2009-12-02T19:11:00.002+01:00

I am at the throat of my dissertation thesis. Actually have been for quite some weeks. I definitely want to finish it before xmas. That is a must.

Also, Google came around the corner offering fellowships in my research area. To make sure you get this: this ain't a job offer, it's just an option to apply for the fellowship. It is not certain if it will be granted or not. Still, it might be interesting - especially for those following me in my research, sustaining the wave and pushing Requirements Engineering a little further. These guys want to. And they should be able to do so.
Yeah, there's long ways to go, but somebody has to get to the bottom of the pit.

The end of this week should be marked by a rough sketch of the thesis contents. The outline is done, some of the contents and illustrations are already created. But again, way to go.

Let's see what I can tell you next week.

Finished IJSC Journal Article

2009-11-25T09:58:00.002+01:00

Just finished the camera ready version of the IJSC article. The paper is due Dec, 1st, but it never hurts to be done earlier than expected.
So look out for our first journal paper in 2010!

Working on Research Project Grants

2009-10-13T18:44:00.002+02:00

We are currently planning and structuring our research for the next couple of years.
This will then be transformed into a research application at the DFG.

The structure and contents of the application are all set - now we are in the process of writing the application since we plan on expanding the research area by mid of next year.

This week, we'll finish the "Goal and Contributionts" section as well as the "Preliminary Results".
Next week should be the rest of "Related Work" and then we should be almost good to go.

Made the Switch to KIT

2009-10-07T11:49:00.002+02:00

I finally made the switch to me@kit.edu.
That means sven.koerner@ ...

It took quite a while and somehow I had to mess with the whole administration to get it done.
The problem seems to have been that I am still a student (PhD student, to be precise) at university whereas I am also an employee of the university. Well, at least I have employee's rights.
Anyhow - the two accounts seem to be inherently distinct and this caused a lot of problems when I tried to get my paperwork straight.
That said, my quest for the kit.edu program is over. I made it and it took only 8 months (yes, it started in February with applying for the correct email address).

Background:
The University of Karlsruhe merged with other technology research projects in the area to form the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology - short: KIT (yes, the similar sounding to MIT is intended). More information to be found at www.kit.edu

Planning Research Future

2009-09-23T12:58:00.003+02:00

I am finally back from the US.
We spent the last couple of days focusing on planning, scoping and scheduling the research plans for the next couple of months. The complete plan includes work for the research group up to the year 2012. These are all tasks which we have and want to address in the future.

We will present our plans next week and try to get the buy in from our professor and faculty. After that, we can focus on budget and middle-term planning. The short-term planning (that is until April 2010) is almost finished. This includes

2 master's thesis
1 possible master's thesis
my dissertation proposal
and finally: my dissertation

All our work will be published, structured and planned using Trac. You might want to take a look at it here.

Attending the ICSC2009 in Berkely, USA

2009-09-15T17:15:00.003+02:00

At this very moment, I am about to hear the opening keynote for the 2nd day of the ICSC2009 in Berkeley.
I got here on Sunday night after my 3 weeks vacation touring all over the western US (that includes Napa, Yosemite, Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, Phoenix) and visiting my family in San Diego.
I was fortunate enough to have my presentation at 10am the first day of the conference on Monday. It went wall and considering the fact that Dr. Fillmore and Dr. Scott attended my talk made it even more interesting. Some of the people who were in the audience let my know during the reception dinner that they really enjoyed my talk and that they were able to tell I was confident speaking in front of crowds. Well, that's when all the music studies and concerts I gave pay off ;-)

Today, I will listen to another parallel session about NLP - there were some interesting aspects so far which I might be able to consider for my work. I will have to thoroughly read the papers though.

That's it for now, I will keep you posted.

Planning Session for The Next 12 Months

2009-08-19T18:40:00.004+02:00

After discussing a possible application for a project funding of our research, I sat down with the my colleagues to evaluate the situation.
The first step was to summon all possible achievements until today and to put these into the big picture. After approx. 2hours we had them sorted out.
The 2nd step then involved probing through ideas, visions, and hints we had so far. These then had to be included into the big picture to show what will be possible with our research in the long term.

As was to be expected, we extracted several tasks to check further research scopes and we will try to make this presentable by September, 20th.

From then on, we will try to write the application as well as focus the research on the big picture we just drew. This includes writing down my work for the purpose of finishing my PhD thesis.
Hopefully, this works out the way we planned it today.
But I have to say - it's a solid approach which makes a lot of sense.

I am off to San Francisco now - cya in a couple of weeks.

Voted for IEEE presidency

2009-08-12T18:35:00.002+02:00

Yesterday I voted for the IEEE presidency.
This year, online voting was possible. For a IEEE member not living in the US, this makes a hell lot of more sense than sending snail-mail ballots back to the middle-west of the US of A.

The online system is not beautiful, but it worked like a charm. Congratulations to the providers of this service. It saved my quite some time.

Submitted IJSC 2009 Article for Review

2009-08-12T18:30:00.002+02:00

I just finished the paper for the IJSC 2009 journal.
It comprises 25 pages about my work in the previous 12 months.
As soon as I know if this paper is accepted, I will post it here.

So this should be it for this year's publications. Maybe one more at the end of the year, we'll see.

Next I will have to prepare my presentation for the ICSC 2009 conference in San Francisco. I still have to decide whether I want to make it "Presentation Zen" style, or standard. Depends on the conference attendees. And these you never know before you show up on site.

IJSC 2009 Article in the Making

2009-08-05T13:42:00.002+02:00

I just finished structuring the IJSC article which will be published in the special edition of this year's print.
I did receive an invitation to add some of my work after submitting another paper to the ICSC 2009 conference.

The paper for the journal must not be longer than 25 pages which means we will be able to add some information compared to prior papers for conferences, but will not be able to holistically describe our approach. Well, that's what publishing is all about: Put it in a nutshell.

The deadline is Wednesday, so not much slack there this weekend. But hey, that's the way we wanted it.

Sunny greetings - weather is perfect here.

Officially an IEEE member now

2009-07-24T10:54:00.003+02:00

This is actually the first time I am back at my university office since the SEKE conference in Boston.
I am now officially an IEEE member with an IEEE ID. Nice.

For the time being, it saved my university approx. $200 when registering for the ICSC2009. That benefit is not directly for me, but hey - it's for the good of the world (or so I keep telling me).

ICSC 2009 Camera Ready Submitted

2009-07-16T08:29:00.001+02:00

It was not as easy as expected (had to follow all the authors rules and then pdfXpress check would not work), but I finally managed to submit our camera ready file to ICSC.
It passed the IEEEXplore test and is therefore valid and approved for printing.

The paper can be viewed here.

Have fun with it.

SEKE 2009 Paper and Presentation for Download

2009-07-08T18:12:00.001+02:00

Hi Folks,

here is my paper for download.

And for those of you who already requested it, here are the slides I used for the presentation.
This slide-deck actually includes 2 more slides which I was not able to show during the presentation. But who knew that the projector was going to die on me after 10 minutes? Exactly: nobody.

Have fun with it and leave me a comment what you thought about it.

FYI: Next step is camera ready version for ICSC 2009. Should be finished this weekend.

Attending the SEKE 2009 in Boston

2009-07-02T16:43:00.002+02:00

I am at the SEKE 2009 in Boston at this very moment.
I have already seen astonishing presentations, i.e. in a good and a bad way.

There was a presentation where a girl literally read her slides aloud while watching the screen not even looking at the audience once. I thought this was just a joke about powerpoint madness. Reality can be tough.
There was a very nice presentation which included audience interaction with the speaker as well as very easy to grasp examples with hands on experience. The guy used balls which he juggled during his presentation. Pretty good show and his points came across easily. I still remember all the aspects he noted during his presentation. Well, that was really good.

My talk will be tomorrow morning o920am (ET).
Tonight is the banquett dinner which includes a city bus tour and a visit at Harvard. I am looking forward to that.

Have a good week and I'll let you know how the presentation went.

IEEE ICSC - We're Coming!

2009-06-23T13:52:00.003+02:00

We got word today that another of our papers was accepted.
The conference is the IEEE ICSC 2009 conference in Berkeley, CA.

We are happy that we achieved the acknowledgment for the huge effort we made to write this paper. The "reading was excellent" (that's what the reviewers said) and we made it though the acceptance rate was below 30%.
This really makes my day.

This weeks plans still are to finalize the presentation for the SEKE 2009 conference and then work on the camera ready file of the ICSC paper.

I'll keep you updated.

Giving the Presentation a Garr Reynolds Style

2009-06-10T15:20:00.005+02:00

Some of you might have read the book "Presentation Zen" by Garr Reynolds or maybe follow his blog.
I am changing my plain standard presentation (as I laid it out last week) into a Garr-style presentation. I expect it to fulfill a couple of serious jobs for me while I present one year's work in about 25 minutes. These jobs are:

get the attention of the audience though they might already be exhausted from the 2 days prior conference presentations they have seen
transport my message, i.e. giving them a profound and understandable overview of what I have done within the last 12 months of research
get them excited for the subject so that I can gather valuable feedback and comments
stick out of the masses (which I personally think is always good)
get more attendants to read my actual article in the conference proceedings

Other possible options are:

win the best-paper award because of the presentation
get offered a million dollar job because of that presentation
... fill in any possible dream you might have ...

Well, that's it for this week's funny story. I am off for the holiday and travel to Switzerland after that.
The proposal has to wait a couple of more days.

I wish you the best. Cya.

Created SEKE 2009 presentation

2009-06-03T21:15:00.002+02:00

Hi Folks,

just got done with the presentation for SEKE 2009 which takes place in Boston in approx. 4 weeks.
So far I have arranged a presentation of 12 slides which should be enough to transport my research and also entertain the people a little bit.
We all know that research presentations can be long, tiresome and back-killers once your forehead hits the table since you fell asleep. Well, it's not that bad, but we could all learn something from TED. That's for sure.

Further, I am still waiting for feedback to the other conference we sent our latest paper.
This might mark the start of the final stage of my PhD program.
We'll see, I'll keep you guys posted.

Have a great night, I am out of here.

Preparation for Thesis Proposal

2009-05-13T17:59:00.003+02:00

As we have submitted our final paper for this year's first half, I am preparing my thesis proposal.

To those of you who wonder what the proposal is all about:
It is as well intended for my supervisor as for any other skilled mind which does not come from my certain area of research. It shows what my idea of what I have been working on so far and explains what the drawback of related work have been. It ends with a kind of roadmap to reaching the final part of the PhD student's life: The dissertation.

In short this means I am structuring my research findings to cover 6 important points I have to address with the proposal.

A statement of the problem and why it should be solved (is there a problem at all?)
Reference to and comments upon relevant work in this area (what have the others done so far?)
My ideas and insights of how to solve the problem plus results I have already obtained (this is how i role! And yes, I can do it ...)
Characterization of the solution that is being sought after (when do I want to stop and insist on the piece of paper they call degree)
A plan of action (what else is there to do besides writing it all down? Often many hours are buried in evaluation)
A rough outline of the thesis (well, what the little book gonna look like?)

Besides that, I still have to prepare the presentation for the SEKE 2009 conference.
But as you can see, this should be enough work for the next 2 months.

On the Verge of Submission

2009-05-05T18:26:00.002+02:00

The submission date for ICSC was postponed to May, 10th.
We haven't made many changes on the paper for 2 weeks, but some minor adjustments in last couple of days.
We plan to submit the paper on Friday and give it another two days to find spelling errors and other mistakes in the document.

After that, we need to prepare the presentation for the SEKE 2009 conference as long as the papers "ingredients" are still fresh in our mind.
I am looking forward to visiting Boston. Always liked the city and having a hotel at the harbor has never proved to be a mistake.

Talk to you soon.

Alpha Version of new paper is ready

2009-04-22T20:10:00.003+02:00

The alpha version of the new paper is finished as scheduled.
The submission date is not till next Thursday, but we are already as far as we could go.
A last check on the weekend should suffice.

Yeah, we got it. Honestly, this feels great - it's been a stressful 10 weeks.

SEKE 2009 is Camera Ready, 2nd paper almost done

2009-04-21T20:18:00.001+02:00

I just finished the SEKE 2009 camera ready version. In case none of my pals find any typos or incorrect sentences, this should be the final version before the submission on May, 1st.

The other paper describing RESI in all its detail and workmanship is also almost done. We finished our internal alpha-version at the weekend and already progressing to the beta-version which should be ready on Saturday or Sunday.
This one will simmer till Wednesday the following week and will then be submitted after a final proof-reading. Let's hope the best the reviewers like our paper as much as we do.

So long, that's it for today. I am out.

Accepted for SEKE 2009

2009-04-16T09:52:00.003+02:00

Our first paper submission (due march, 25th) was accepted at the SEKE 2009 conference in Boston.
Congratulations to all of us. It was tough work - and it seems to pay off any time.
We got an overall scoring of 7.8/10 which is pretty good for a first shot.
The reviewers remarked things we were already aware about and also suggested that we should keep focusing on getting the software to run.
Well, this is what we (already) did and therefore are about to finish the next paper concerning the other topics which we could not address so far.

Today we're going to have our internal paper-workshop which should give us a nice alpha-version of the next paper which is then due on May, 1st.
From our own opinion, this paper is even better than the last one and we are confident that our submission might yield fruit soon.

Have a sunny day, y'all.

Paper 2 in pre-alpha state

2009-04-08T19:04:00.003+02:00

Discussed the paper content with Torben today (he writes his master thesis).
We did some polishing on the existing chapters and divided the work for the following chapters.
So far, I would dare to say the paper is 60% done. Give it another week and we should have a nice alpha version up next Sunday.
After that we need to pass the Walter F. Tichy (head of our research chair) quality-gate and probably run another revision of the paper (this would be the beta version).
After that, we let it simmer for another 5 days and do a last check and changes. This leads to the gamma version which we will then submit to the conference.

So far we're good on the schedule ... let's stay focused so we can keep the timeline.

Happy Easter to everybody and cya next week.

Paper 1 submitted, Paper 2 in progress

2009-04-01T13:18:00.002+02:00

Hi all,

the first paper of this quarters plan is submitted to the conference. Let's see if our work satisfies the reviewers. We truly hope so.
It is the conceptual basis of the tool we're working on at the moment. Parts of the implementation are already done.

Today, we prepared the rough sketch of the next paper which will describe in detail how RESI (Requirements Engineering Specification Improver) works. This one will be submitted to the ICSC at the end of the month.

Next thing I need to do is update the AutoModel homepage and my profile.
That's it for today.

Btw - where's the sun? I was promised sunshine and love from last nights forecast ... none of it here today. Damn.

Preparing Two More Papers

2009-03-04T21:25:00.000+01:00

We are currently working on two more conference-articles (papers, that is).
One explains the conceptual work we had to overcome with the "ontology decider",
the 2nd will explain how the ontology-decider system itself works.

The first paper is due March, 16th whereas the other one needs to be presented by May, 1st.

So far, we're on time and the schedule seems doable. This means another 8 stressful weeks, but by then we'll know what we did it for.

It might be the last two papers before I start to compose parts of my PhD-thesis from what I learned in the last 3 years. Let's see if this plan turns out the way it feels right now.

Preparing annual report

2009-01-13T23:10:00.003+01:00

I am about to file in my annual report for 2008. The reports are being published university-wide in February and also used for the university's monetary justification.

I will combine my report with Tom's and I will cover the following aspects:

My article which I presented in San Francisco, June 2008
The ideas of ontology-usage improving automatic model creation
The research currently being undergone by me and my team (UML enriching with various ontologies)

So long ... 10-7, over and out.

EduSymp paper gone rogue - in a positive way

2008-11-12T17:24:00.002+01:00

Our EduSymp-paper went wild on the paper-rating list.
Therefore it will (additionally to the publishing of the conference proceedings) be published in a LNCS-book.

According to experienced sources, this might take up to 1 year till the printed version will be in our hands. Well, too bad.

Still, we're proud and happy that this worked out so well for us. As a matter of fact, we also had to do another review-procedure for the paper before we sent it out to the print-shop. This puts another 20 hours of work on top of the 300 hours for the initial creation ;-)
Well, I guess we're all not here just for the fun of it.

Structured Plans for SaleMX Project

2008-11-12T17:13:00.004+01:00

The SaleMX Project is up on the track to glory and fame. Or at least something like that.

If you go to the SaleMX web page,

you'll find all the information for our project/work.

The project includes all of Tom's and my work and bundles our forces to achieve our research goals.
We are currently 5 people cooperating on this project. These are:

Mathias
Bugra
Torben
Tom
me, myself and I

The new plan/roadmap looks like the following:

The UML-Decider including the User-GUI for the changes in the graph model are my responsibilty whereas tom has to focus on the left-hand side part of the model.
The dotted lines are the parts of the project we still need to realize. So there is still some work to do as you can see. Never the less, the end is in sight.

Boiling down related work

2008-08-28T18:46:00.002+02:00

The first step for my internal presentation for my PhD-thesis-advisor is to concentrate the related work into edible chunks. Focus on the main facts, try to find questions for the already related work and base your idea on that. Make sure know how to address the questions not solved by the other papers and point out the (extreme) difficulties which you deal with.
Also precisely define your context and what you are going to leave out and what not. What is essential to your work, what has already been addressed and is not part of your work, but only a side-dish (just to stick with the food analogy).

Well ... one week of work ahead of me. Let's start asap.

Back from Vacation: Working on thesis proposal

2008-08-21T17:45:00.003+02:00

Hi Folks,

just wanted to let you know I am back from vacation and ready to do some research.
My colleagues spent the last couple of days setting up the nice "Trac" project admin guide-tool which should support us during the development phase of our ideas.
I am writing on the thesis structure and the proposal which will include the four big paragraphs

Introduction
Hypothesis
Research Plan
Evaluation/Evaluative Aspects

After writing this, my professor should be able to give me proper guidance how to proceed in the project and whether I should change some things or not. I guess I got quite far, so far.

Planning Work Camera Ready Version for EduSymp2008

2008-07-29T19:38:00.002+02:00

Today, I restructured my thesis and also added some fine ideas I brought home with me from the SEKE conference.

There is a little rework necessary for the EduSymp paper so we were rated 3 times "stronly accepted" and 2 times "weakly accepted". That's a pretty satisfying result.
Matter of fact, the reviewers were all craving for more information which we (most likely) won't be able to include into the paper due to page number restrictions. We cannot shorten the article more than 1 or 2 paragraphs without losing information and track of the thin red line. If we are allowed to purchase additional pages, we might add some extra information as (legitimately) requested by the reviewers.
There are after all 15 recommendations we would like to consider revising the paper and forming it into yet another version of our solution-paper. Some of the things pointed out are quite easy to explain/solve in the paper. Some others might not quite make it into the article. It's all about priorities.

EduSymp on MODELS2008 paper accepted

2008-07-29T09:55:00.002+02:00

We just got notice that our paper "Automatic Checklist Creation for the Assessment of UML Models" got accepted at the educator's symposium on MODELS2008 conference.
Well, this is good news for the start of a new day.
There is some work to be done till we can ship the camera ready version on August, 11th, but we should be able to finish this task by the end of the week.
I have to read through the inspectors notes to see what we could/can improve whilst polishing the article for the camera ready version.

Work on PhD-Thesis structure

2008-07-23T12:35:00.002+02:00

As I already explained yesterday, I am planning my work for the next couple of weeks. First of all, this will include improving/changing/adapting the structure of my thesis as well as incorporating the ideas and feedback I got attending SEKE 2008.
Also, I have to find additional hooks in the requirements engineering "society" where I can plug in with my solution. So far, we are still the only ones with this approach; at least as far as we can tell.

A question I was asked quite a few times during the conference was why I used thematic relations to work with text. Well, matter of fact this was mostly due to that the people working on this part of RE sit right across the hallway from my office. This makes Q&A easier and faster.
Also I think, covering the approach with a complete process from textual specifications to UML (and maybe even to code) is a lot more "life-like" then other variants. So far we have not run into bigger problems and will stick to this approach as long as possible (unless any of you readers does have a perfect argument and objects). If we should bump into bigger obstacles, we certainly would adapt our approach to a more feasible study.

Back from SEKE 2008

2008-07-22T18:18:00.003+02:00

I am finally back in Germany. SEKE 2008 went well and I received a lot of interesting feedback. So far, no critics have been uttered, but my presentation led to accreditation of my work.
Right now I am in the process of evaluating the feedback and setting down a plan how to proceed in the next couple of months. Question are:

which results do I want to achieve next
which conference do I want to submit articles
how do I plan and engage my student helper's work
which would be possible study thesis I could post
who from the academic community should I try to cooperate with (see related work)
when to start writing the proposal for my PhD thesis and try to get it acknowledged

As you can see - quite a few questions which might be solvable during the summer break which is just around the corner. Well, I'll have to stash my vacation-bag with a number of articles and mind-augmenting drugs. (latter of which was a joke in case you didn't get it)

Well, enough to do for tomorrow, I figure.

Preps for SEKE 2008 completed, next paper in line

2008-06-04T15:09:00.004+02:00

The preparations for the SEKE 2008 conference are finally completed.
The camera ready file can be downloaded here.
Hotel and flights are booked and we are good to go. Just some minor adjustments on the slides I made.

We are already planning another paper (on which I am working at the moment) for the MODELS2008 conference. Actually, that educators symposium, that is. We'll be presenting our advancement in the area of creating checklists to correct UML exam or homework exercises.
More to come here soon.

SEKE 2008 Paper Accepted

2008-04-29T13:57:00.002+02:00

Cheerio,

my paper "Improving Automatic Model Creation using Ontologies" has been accepted by the SEKE 2008 conference on April, 17th.
The ratings for the paper turned out to be 2 times .80 and one reviewer chose to give me only .20. He/she also doubted that my paper belonged to the conference and therefore weakly rejected it. I guess I'll have to make up for that in the camera ready version which is due May, 7th.

My paper is 7 pages long, including references and illustrations. I need to crop this down to 6 pages and make the article firmer and preciser. This is going to be my job for the next two days. I am planning on re-submitting the paper early next week.
I will post the camera-ready version here in this blog so you can take a look at it.

So far, I still have to book the flight and make hotel reservations.

I'll keep you updated.

Submitted article - waiting for reviewer's feedback

2008-04-01T12:58:00.003+02:00

Again, it's been a while since my last post.
Matter of fact I submitted my first article concerning ontology usage to improve automatic model creation about 10 days ago. The choice was the SEKE conference, taking place in the bay area in July.
The submitted version of the paper can be downloaded here.
Information about acceptance or refusal should be available within the next 2 weeks.

On my next steps, I am working together with a student trying to build a completely covered process from textual specification to UML model directly.

Let's see what new discoveries lie on that path for us.

Orchestration of Concepts

2008-03-01T18:25:00.005+01:00

The paper we need to get ready is finally out of its initial stages.
We addressed the related work and most importantly the reasoning part so far. Latter of which still has to be written down for the paper in TeX, but that should not take longer than a day.
I have focused on dealing with RCyc in the last 4 days and have to say that I personally think I am pretty savvy with the system(s) now.
The only thing I haven't gotten up and working so far is the newest Cyc-Version (KB 7130, that is) which still throws numerous exceptions when using it. I assume there's something wrong with the Cyc-World (Ontology).

Next steps are to list the results and progress in a table which should then be sufficiently described for the paper. At the moment we plan submitting the paper on march, 12th. That's still some time to go and I think we can make the deadline.

As of now, I just found out that the ICSC conference extended its submission deadline to march, 16th. So we might even want to chose which conference to deliver the paper to. We'll see.

Just to show you how the information gathering during the model creation process works, here two illustrations that should explain it.

The text (text.txt) is annotated manually. The annotated text (now text.sale) is then automatically transformed to a GrGen Graph-Rewriting Script (text.grs).
Having provided the Graph-Model for the specific domain - in our example UML - and using the GrShell to create the initial graph.
To give you a glimpse of what this looks like, check out the next picture which shows exemplary data in the various files.

And that's it for now. I'll come back to this later. I'll explain the whole orchestration in more detail once we have the paper for the conference.

Getting GrGen to dump data

2008-02-13T20:27:00.002+01:00

Worked on the GrGen-Graph-Models today.
So far I've started to get familiar with the procedures necessary to work the tool. And yes, I have to admit, it is fast.
I already know which data to fish from the SALE-Models we already pushed into GrGen. The problem is, that GrGen is not behaving deterministically in any way. I guess I'll have to ring the maintainer of the project tomorrow to find how this could be resolved.
If I can answer all those questions by tomorrow evening, I see a very good chance that the paper for the ICSC could become a success. I am sure we have to start writing on it at the end of this week, otherwise, the night-shift might kill us (again).

So long, I am out of here for today, gotta be back early tomorrow morning.

Using reasoning to disambiguate natural language

2008-02-05T18:43:00.000+01:00

Natural language always is ambiguous. There is no denying the fact.
Now when transforming specifications written in natural language into UML, one might want to make sure, that misinterpretations and misunderstandings are as seldom as possible.
But what if the words "user" and "client" are used to describe the same object? How might a electronic system grasp the similarity and understand? How am I telling the system to combine the actions (or methods if you want to call it so) and properties into one object (or class, if we stayed in OO-Code-speak).
Using an underlying ontology we will try to show that specifications can be made better, proper and severely more elaborated with the "insight" of common sense.
The first approach on this work has to be finished in the next 4 weeks since we do want to publish this on the ICSC conference 2008. Once again - no time to lean back. Full steam ahead!
For this week I will try to get the necessary information from the system.
Next weeks job will be to integrate the APIs so that the graph modeling framework GrGen we're using to transform annotated text into UML will be able to take advantage of the common sense we revived.
As always - it stays exciting!

Done with paper - next paper

2008-01-29T16:34:00.001+01:00

Hi Folks,

we finally survived last weeks deadline delivering the paper (as to be expected!) right on time. Sure we had to sneak in some night shifts which lead to approximately 4h sleep/day. But hey - the weekend was close and as I already mentioned. We made it. Let's see what the committee has to say about our approach.
I leave you the paper for download here.
As you can see, it was a co-operation of a couple of people working here. Mathias being the one who's study thesis is closely attached to this article, Tom and me being the one supervising Mathias and adding up to the work necessary for this paper and finally Andreas - the man for the statistics. Him being an empirical researcher for Software Engineering lead us to the conclusion, that it might be best to consult him when it comes to making statistically relevant statements.

But as the title of this post shows, we're heading right to the next conference paper which will be due in mid-march. We'll try to put the plan on the rails this week and then go from there. I hope we can get the train up to speed by then and deliver this paper about reasoning on annotated English natural language. There are several issues to address, a number of which I have to focus on for the next paper.
I am excited about where this might lead us.

Preparing a paper for MiSE 2008, Leipzig

2008-01-19T10:02:00.001+01:00

Hi Folks,

it's been quite a while since my last post.
I have put most of my work force into http://searchingforsense.blogspot.com/ which is not a public blog.
At the moment we are working on a paper for the MiSE in Leipzig this May. Submission date is Jan, 24th and therefore there's still quite some stuff to do.
Until this date there won't be much happening here.
But the week after next week should be the big comeback of this blog. I am revisiting the mind maps and layouts for the research project and adopting newly gained knowledge to the concepts. Let's see what we find out and which direction we'll be heading at from next week on.

I'll tell you more soon.

Another week - another success

2007-11-29T18:28:00.000+01:00

Finally got Cyc to work just like I wanted it to!
I contacted Larry from Cyc and he was able to give me a version which did actually work the way I wanted it to.
Now I am back on track.
Did lots of jobs for the "Searching for Sense" blog which is private, so you won't be able to see those results.

Matter of fact I will now check my reasoning ideas in the live environment of my Cyc-world.
The game of Ludo will serve as template for eventual problems.

But first I will have to look into yet some other papers to get this straight.

For those who've been following my blog:
Annotation of text is necessary to "transfer" text into something the computer can process. This process does not work that well fully automated. Parsers cannot cope with semantics and therefore make many mistakes.
My goal is to minimize those mistakes by using knowledge/reasoning on the texts that are processes. So far the average detection rate is close to 30%.
If my reasoning can lift this rate up to 50% or higher - my goal would be reached.

Human beings tend to regularly hit the 99-100% mark, by the way.
But then they don't precisely evaluate a 200 pages document in 15mins, but more 5 weeks.

Have a great weekend.

Damn I was busy ...

2007-11-21T17:01:00.001+01:00

Hey folks,

sorry for not having posted in almost 2 weeks.
I was busy doing stuff which does not directly concern AutoModel.

I finally managed to get Cyc back on track, but my machine is going to kill me. It just takes forever to process. I do need more RAM. And now comes the fun part: My 10months old machine can only handle 2GB of RAM. Well, that is everything but not sufficient for what ResearchCyc demands form my main memory. Too bad.
The 8 core servers in our institute are not useful since Cyc is not running properly under win2k3 or Ubuntu. It does need Win2k/XP or Suse9.x
Again - too bad.

I have updated my mindmap and added some words to my diss.

As for what I am working on in the next few days, that would be:

gaining deeper insight in handling inferences with Cyc
using the Cyc Java API to handle requests and publish those in a very rudimentary way
find out which queries/request would be most helpful while annotating the text.

That should be it for today.

Ontologies - don't always work the way you want them to

2007-11-06T23:04:00.000+01:00

I talked to the guys from Cyc today since there Cyc-System would not let me rebuild "my world". I already tried compiling the world in serveral systems, as were:

Ubuntu 7.1
Debian 4.0
Windows XP SP2
Windows Vista

Most of the times the unpacking of the zips didn't work and I got a CRC-error. Therefore I contacted Cyc and they said they would like into the issue and tell me what was going on.

Let's see what the folks have to say tomorrow. So far I was able to resurrect an old backup of my Cyc-Database which seems to work just fine.
Working with this all day long I found out that I might need a server for running Cyc on. Having the whole system in a virtual machine on my desktop just isn't what I would call "fast".

Cyc just released a new Version of their "world" (V.1.1.2) which I already downloaded but could not get to work either. It's kind of frustrating.
Last time I dealt with it, it worked like charm. I'll give you an update.

Stability issues with ResearchCyc

2007-11-05T16:56:00.001+01:00

The next weeks will all be in the name of ResearchCyc.
Unfortunately I crashed my Cyc-installation last week and couldn't get it back up and running till today. Therefore I planned to switch to a Unix-based server system for Cyc.
Well - damn me, but I should have read the instructions carefully. My favourite Linux (debian, that is) wouldn't be able to run ResearchCyc - it's only meant for RedHat and Suse.
Those guys are using some very specific binaries which couldn't be launched on debian etch. Too bad.
Well, I guess I am going back to another virtual Windows machine. Preferable Windows XP - that did work without any problems so far. Well, I still got a couple of hours left here ... that should suffice to get the system up and running.

Slides are online

2007-11-05T16:54:00.000+01:00

The slides are online now.
You can get them here.

Summing up my work in 19 slides

2007-10-29T18:26:00.001+01:00

I just finished summing up the work of the last 12 months into 19 slides for my PhD-Meeting tomorrow.
I will upload the files asap when I got the web server back online on which I can put the files.

Tomorrow will be another "Try to get used to working with (Research-)Cyc" day. That thing is so powerful and yet so awkward to use once in a while ... and the stubby Java interface they issue with it doesn't help this a lot.
Well, I guess I'll have to deal with it.

I will give you a short sum-up of my slides later tonight after I refined them once more.

So long.

Preparing for PhD Meeting

2007-10-24T22:43:00.000+02:00

I got a talk with my co-PhD-Students and my professor on Tuesday evening.
There I will present my results, what I did so far, what I achieved and what the future possible holds for me.
This also includes feedback to my work and giving directions for the next few weeks months of work.

I will offer my presentation as download here as soon as it's done. I should be done with it this Sunday. At least that's my plan.

See you guys soon.

Bordering aspects

2007-10-09T11:08:00.000+02:00

The system we dream of is supposed to generate program code from natural language.
So far, so good.

My job is to put enough "common sense" into the processing task so that most of the mistakes machines still make can be avoided.
Or to cite Voltaire here: The problem with common sense is, that it is not so common.

But what if we succeed in this task? Somebody will still have to work with the piece of Software we generated. Somebody will have to use it. So what are the interfaces? How can our software interact? How easy will it be to understand that piece of software?
Will it make up for the time we saved generating the code? What do we have to look out for?

To sum it up: What happens around our scenario? Do we have to address that or can we just ignore how to deal with what the machine is supposed to deliver? I don't know yet.

Questions over questions which I will try to address in the next weeks as well.
Thanks to my friend Georg for this valuable tip.

Annotating text - questions raised

2007-10-08T11:13:00.000+02:00

Hey, it's been almost 2 weeks.
But I do have some results for you. They look like that:

"Leaving one’s own king under attack, exposing one’s own king to attack and also ’capturing’ the opponent’s king are not allowed."

This would be the original text from the specification.
In order to transform this into a graph, thematic (theta) roles have to be given to each necessary part of the sentence. The redundant/disposable words are just "sharpened-out" by marking them with a #.

The output of this sentence would be something like this:

[ { [ Leaving|ACT one`s1|POSS #own king|{HAB,STATII} under_attack|STAT, ] , [ exposing|ACT one`s2|POSS #own king|{HAB,STATII} to_attack|STAT ] , [ #and #also capturing|ACT #the opponent`s|POSS king|HAB ] }|MODII #are not_allowed|MOD. ]

one`s1 <= They
one`s2 <= They

This might look a little confusing in the beginning, but it is also quite impressive, how easy it is for us humans, to understand relations and concepts of a sentence. But sitting there and annotating the text by hand quickly shows that many things are processed by our brain implicitly and are actually quite hard to put on paper.

To put it short:
Reading the above sentence does not make you think of possessors, habitums and stati at once, does it? We recognize verbs and nouns, the rest just seems to come "naturally".

This is in my opinion the biggest obstacle when it comes to machine understanding.

Anyway, several question especially concerning reasoning where raised. Those were:

How will we be dealing with numerals after all?
When is a word a numeral, when an article?

e.g.: "one can find ..." or "you can move with only one player"

one == same?

one == 1?

one == one/you?

How can realations in numerals be detected?

e.g.: "The chessboard has 8x8 field. Those 64 fields ..."

What happens to prepositions which seem unnecessary while annotation but actually do or can change the semantics of the sentence?

e.g.: "the near corner square to the right of the player is white"
"to the right of the player" (shows a location) is different from "the right of the player" (could also mean the right in a jurisdictional way)

Difference between verbs and their tense:

e.g.: "checkmate" vs. "checkmated" which mean something different

Well, a lot of new stuff to think about I guess ...

ResearchCyc as the ontology of choice

2007-09-26T23:46:00.000+02:00

Hi folks,

first of all, I have to say that I won my battle against TeX. The initial setup for the dissertation with which I will start annotating the papers is done.
I wrote short summaries of all papers and marked which parts of the articles I would like to mention to motivate my goals.

Next week we're gonna sit down with a student working on the concept of annotating theta-roles to textual specifications. This is going to be extremely interesting since we do not quite know what to expect.
Many concepts just take place in a human's brain while reading text, but when one actually has to mark the words with the right roles which apply in the given context... well, that seems to be something different and quite strenuous. Let's see what insight we gain during this test. This will most likely affect the direction in which the research in our area will head in the next couple of weeks/months.

Additional to all that, I jumped back on the (Research-)Cyc Ontology for reasoning purposes. It might already help while annotating text. But it could also be very helpful on the transformation side, when the sentence has already being parsed into a graph. Well, I guess we'll find out.

Thematic roles introduction

2007-09-22T23:15:00.000+02:00

As I promised you a couple of days ago - here's the explanation of the graph transforming on thematic roles and how we plan to reason on this models.

Thematic roles - also known as theta-roles - are best described in the following two articles here and here. I do not want to go too deep into explaining that, since the articles are quite voluminous.
If your capable of understanding German, you might even get a more detailed, easier to understand and better covered, please see here and here.

I will add an example of how text is annotated latest on Monday and how this looks like in an easy example.

Other than that, I've been struggling with TeX quite a bit summing up the knowledge of about 55 articles which might be of use for the "state of the art/related work" part of the dissertation.

Well, I'll be back on Monday with the news I promised you. Have a safe weekend.

A short explanation of how this is all supposed to work

2007-09-18T23:50:00.000+02:00

Hey folks,

for those of you who have followed my website, here an update of what the solution is going to look like.
For those of you who see this for the first time - well, be glad you don't have to witness the omnipotence of change in our business *smile*.

The slide above shows a rough sketch of how the tools are supposed to interconnect, exchange their data and finally lead to the UML/Program code of our choice.
The orange "NLP" box represents all possibilites to process natural language. As I already mentioned, there are many - one of which will be taken into closer consideration for AutoModel. We are still comparing the various methods, trying to find the one that works best for us. That's going to be a student thesis.

At this moment, textual transformation (and therefore understanding) takes place by annotating the thematic/theta-roles in the given text. This is still a process which needs a lot of manual labour, but we are already working on an automatic approach to that.

How thematic roles look like, what this is all about and how we later transform these into graphs (all parts of Tom's work), I will tell you in the next post.

Another thing (and quite annoying I have to admit) I was struggling with today was creating the initial dissertation template in LaTex so that I can already start casting my thoughts on paper.
As probably everybody else on this planet using Windows I use MikTeX and TeXnicCenter to get this job done. I still haven't managed to include my JabRef bib-files as literature-list. Well, I guess Rome wasn't built in a day either.

That's it for tonight.

It's papers, papers and guess what? - Papers.

2007-09-18T15:06:00.000+02:00

Hey, haven't written much in the last 5 days.
They were all about reading papers concerning NLP.

Next thing - I will tell you about our approach and what the difference to others is so far (Thematic roles vs. well-known NLP approaches).
After that I might just explain our graph theory approach and where the challenge lies.

The other questions are:

What's the state of the art?
Where are the gaps?
Which are the big questions?
Where do we have to narrow our field (since we do not claim to have a solution which is universal)?

All these questions have to be cumulated and casted into papers. And once you have a bunch of papers you align 'em and make your dissertation out of those.
Well, it's note quite as easy, but that is the approximate approach.

More infos to come these days. Have a good one.

Mindmapping the papers, ideas for an article

2007-09-11T23:57:00.001+02:00

I spent the last two days gaining an overview of another 10 or so papers about commonsense reasoning on natural language and processing of natural language and possible user interaction.
Quite a wide field.
I also talked to my colleague Tom and we have several approaches which we need to address in the next couple of weeks:

First of all we found the perfect set of word / text which we would like to interpret. It's a strict rule, it does make sense, everybody know it and can relate to it and we will not have to bother too much with ambiguities and weird word usages.
What am I talking about? Well, I am talking about the official rules of chess.
We will come up with an article concerning the state-of-the-art of processing natural language and converting into program code or anything similar.
We will then add our thoughts and extensions which we mean to introduce in the next couple of months to round up the complete picture

So far, there are many approaches of dealing with natural language.
One uses the semantics of the English language and transfers those into programmatic semantics. Others rely only controlled languages and specified domains. Some out there intertwine their concepts with MDA and some started to reason/infer on natural sentences.

All of these ideas bring us closer to what we want, but the complete picture is now clearer:
We want give the progam the chess-specification and we shall receive a UML-model out of which code could be generated that can actually "play chess".

Tom's approach with graphs (I will explain that in a later post) abstracts from many other solutions because it initially relies on thematic roles. From then on, it's all graph transformations including reasoning. The latter one will be my part. No need of specified objects, etc. is necessary after the initial prose has been annotated.

The disadvantage of many approaches so far is, that they mostly rely on the specifics of the English language. We understand that this whole concept has to work with any language out there. Or at least a great deal of them.

The steps to be fulfilled and realized therefore are:

Annotation:
(Half-)Automatically annotate the initial text with its thematic roles
Processing
Process the annotated text and create an inital graph
Use graph-transformation to create an initial UML-model
Reasoning
Use reasoning to get rid of ambiguities or double-fetched objects which belong together.
Also use reasoning to split obvious "objects" into other objects with certain properties, e.g. "The cold bottle" could be one object. But what if a "warm bottle" comes around the corner later? Is this a new object, or do you just have an object "bottle" which has the property "temperature" with its possible values "cold, hot"?
Good question, huh? Well, we'll try to do the latter one - it just makes more sense.
Reasoning will supposedly also take place by just having graph-transformations done.
Processing
Process the results of reasoning again and create the new UML-model.
Then transfer this model into code using any of the popular method to create code from UML.

That's it for today - more at the end of the week. I still have loads of papers in front of me which I have to read ...

Finally back from my trip to Australia/USA

2007-09-10T11:00:00.000+02:00

Alright.
I am finally back from my 7 week trip which led me all the way up and down the Australian east coast and the outback. After another 9 day stopover in California, I eventually arrived back here in "kind-a-cold" but good old Germany.
This week I will try to get myself back up to speed with what I've been dealing before I left 2 months ago.
So far I need to have another look at Natural Language Interpretations and Representations from other colleagues from around the world. Some medical informatics guys already achieved quite a lot when dealing with natural language reports on patients (see here, here and here).

I also have to meet up with my friend and co-worker Tom to get our target aligned again. This will include involving, teaching and mentoring some graduate students which want to support us in our work. Well, I'll give you an update as soon as I know more.