This talk with examine some of the latest technologies being added to the Web, particularly the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and the related XPointer and XLink specifications for hypertext and hypermedia. Then it will present some preliminary thoughts on ways in which linguistic notions and theory have (or in some cases, ought to have) contributed to the functioning of the Web. Among these are ideas from information theory and lexicostatistics, rudimentary constituent analysis, formal languages, and discourse analysis. XML is, in part, an attempt to bring to the Web a more formal notion of the internal structure of texts, in order to facilitate computer processing of data that is, at base, overwhelmingly composed of natural language objects. The talk will also present some historical and techno-political highlights of how the standard came to be, and where it may go in the future.
Bio: Steve DeRose began working with document structure and markup languages while completing his Ph.D. at Brown University in Computational Linguistics, which focused on Hidden Markov Models for grammatical category disambiguation in English and Greek. He worked extensively with the Text Encoding Initiative on the Text Representation Committee, as chair of the Hypermedia subcommitte, and contributed to various other portions such as Writing System Declarations and markup for uncertainty. After completing his Ph.D. he he co-founded Electronic Book Technologies (now part of Inso Corporation), where he was the the architect of DynaText and other products widely used for electronic delivery of very large documents such as aircraft manuals, corpora, etc. In his role as Chief Scientist at Inso and now also at Brown's Scholarly Technology Group, he remains active in standards and research. He is a charter member of the XML Working Group and the editor of XLink and XPointer. He is a frequent speaker in industry and academe, and has written many papers and two books: Making Hypermedia Work: A User's Guide to HyTime (with David Durand), and The SGML FAQ Book. He now lives, works, and ice-skates in Silver Spring, Maryland.
For the colloquium series schedule, see the UMD Computational Linguistics Colloquium Series web page at http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik/cl_colloquium/. If you are interested in meeting with the speaker, please contact Mari Broman Olsen (molsen@umiacs.umd.edu) or Philip Resnik (resnik@umiacs.umd.edu).