Statistical Linguistic Topology

This project considers the unification of two view of language: that from natural language processing and that from linguistic typology. Our view is that typological information is both useful for solving real-world natural language processing and automatically derivable from language data. This research first explores how to use typological knowledge to improve performance on problems such as dependency parsing and machine translation for low density languages.

Principal Investigators

Collaborative Research: Computational Thinking Olympiad (CTO)

This project focuses on developing the infrastructure for a self-sustaining organization that can manage, grow, and evangelize olympiads that involve young students (middle and junior high) in computational thinking. A large component is the creation of pilot olympiads in a select few cities in the United States.

Principal Investigators

Supporting a Nation of Neighbors with Community Analysis Visualization Environments (SOCS)

Computationally-mediated civic participation is emerging as a solution to contemporary problems associated with economic and social issues such as healthcare, energy sustainability, education, environmental protection, and disaster response. The NSF-funded research project conducted by Ben Shneiderman, Alan Neustadtl, and Catherine Plaisant at the University of Maryland will study reasons for successes and failures of the community safety system, Nation of Neighbors. The results will enable interventions to shift the balance towards increasing success.

Principal Investigators

III: Small: Issues in Understanding, Indexing, Querying, and Visualizing Spatio-Textual Spreadsheets on the Web

Numerous organizations including government agencies are sitting on mountains of spreadsheet data that are becoming increasingly common on the web, but whose contents remain out of reach via search engines because direct links to the contents of their constituent cells are rare. Thus spreadsheet data represent legacy databases, especially since many of their underlying schemas are no longer accessible. The goal of this research is to discover the schema according to which the spreadsheet is constructed.

Principal Investigators

CDI - Translation as a Collaborative Process

Natural language translation remains a crucial problem that is expensive, slow to develop solutions for, and difficult to scale. While automated approaches often result in understanding the gist, fully automated high quality translation remains far out of reach for the vast majority of the world's languages. A variety of projects are now emerging that tap into the Web-based community of people willing to help translate, but bilingual expertise is quite rare compared to the total availability of volunteers.

Principal Investigators

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