Suresh Manandhar's Home Page

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Suresh Manandhar — 2005-11-08T20:40:56Z

I am generally interested in a wide range of topics related to natural language processing. These span grammar formalisms, constraint logics, constraint solving, machine learning, learning of lexical relations, question answering systems, minimally supervised learning of syntax, semantics and morphology.

If you are interested in a PhD programme in one of the above topics then please email me. Please note that full funding for non-EU students is extremely difficult to get. Non-EU students will require both the ORS (Overseas Research Scheme) scholarship and a university funding to be fully funded. Check the university finance section for details.

Job Vacancy

Indect Project is looking for a talented Postdoctoral researcher. Click the link for details. Please email me with a CV if interested.

Current projects

Indect Project is a 5 year research project funded under the EU FP7 IP programme. The project will focus on entity resolution, relationship mining, social network analysis and sentiment analysis.

Eureca is a EU Asia mobility programme funded under the EU Erasmus Mundus scheme.

Coming Events

SemEval-3 : 6th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

5th Int'l AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media 17-21 July 2011, Barcelona, Spain

Past Events

Unsupervised and Minimally Supervised Learning of Lexical Semantics : A NAACL - HLT Workshop, Colorado, 5 June 2009.

Unsupervised Word Sense Induction and Disambiguation : A SemEval 2010 challenge task.

Other Activities

Together with Patrick Olivier I founded Lexicle which built the first commercial embodied conversational agent (ECA) system.

Computational logics and constraint solving for natural language processing

Suresh Manandhar — 2005-11-08T21:09:24Z

My PhD at Edinburgh (1988-1993) was focussed on computational logics for natural language processing. During this time I worked on unification algorithms, constraint logics, and efficient constraint solving methods for HPSG (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar). This work extends feature logics with set valued features and word-ordering constraints. It shows the computational complexity and constraint solving methods needed for checking consistency in a number of closely related logics. It also also shows the close connection between feature logics used in natural language processing and frame based knowledge representation languages popular within AI.

I also worked on hybrid categorical grammar logics jointly with Jochen Doerre (IMS, University of Stuttgart). In this work we showed how arbitrary logics can be embedded within the Lambek Calculus while preserving the soundness and completeness properties.

More recently our work (jointly with Alistair Willis) extends the constraint solving framework to tree logics and in particular to quantifier scoping trees.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Suresh Manandhar — 2005-12-01T00:00:00Z

I teach the 3rd Year undergraduate course in natural language processing.

- Current Teaching

Inductive Logic Programming for Natural Language Proceesing

Suresh Manandhar — 2005-11-09T09:47:12Z

Inductive logic programming (ILP) has a strong potential for application to natural language learning. My work focussed on implementing highly efficient first order decision list learning system. This resulted in the implementation of the CLOG first order decision list learner which is available for download. - 10. Research

Unsupervised learning of natural language

Suresh Manandhar — 2005-11-09T09:47:48Z

I have a strong interest in unsupervised learning of natural language. We have worked on unsupervised categorical grammar learning (jointly with Stephen Watkinson); unsupervised learning of morphology (jointly with Dimitar Kazakov); unsupervised learning of lexical relations (jointly with Enrique Alfonseca) and disambiguation using the WWW (jointly with Ioannis Klapaftis). Current work is focussed on unsupervised learning of lexical relations and sense disambiguation using Google as a text (...) - 10. Research

Stochastic Constraint Programming

Suresh Manandhar — 2005-11-09T09:48:26Z

Jointly with Toby Walsh and Armagan Tarim our work on Stochastic Constraint Programming has developed a new constraint programming framework that permits applying constraint programming methods to stochastic problems such as stock market portfolio management and inventory control. This work was funded by an EPSRC grant. We have developed a new programming language, Stochastic OPL that extends existing constraint programming language OPL by allowing the specification of stochastic decision (...) - 10. Research

Embodied Conversational Agents

Suresh Manandhar — 2005-11-09T09:48:51Z

During my work in Lexicle (2001-2003) I worked on question answering systems and building conversational agents. I programmed the core component of Lexicle's natural language processing engine. Together with my PhD students (Marco De Boni and Jose-Luis Jara Valencia) we competed in a QA (Question-Answering) track of the (TREC) Text Retrieval Conferences. - 10. Research

Enhanced QA systems and Persuasive Dialogue

Suresh Manandhar — 2005-11-09T09:49:20Z

Current work is focussed on extending existing Question-Answering (QA) systems to make them more effective for different users. One direction has been on incorporating User-Models (UM) into QA systems to tailor both the content and the presentation of answers to better suit the user. The other direction is on understanding human-human argumentation dialogues and mimicking these within QA (...) - 10. Research

CLOG

Suresh Manandhar — 2005-11-09T12:23:50Z

CLOG is a simple but efficient first-order decision list learning system. First-order decision lists are essentially Prolog clauses each ending with a cut (!). Decision lists can be employed as a representation language for a wide range of tasks.

CLOG has been primarily developed with natural language applications in mind. So far, CLOG has been successfully employed for morphology learning tasks.

Scenario-Based Stochastic Constraint Programming

A. Tarim, Suresh Manandhar, T. Walsh — 2002-12-01T17:32:00Z

- 10. Publications