Section: Scientific Foundations

Empirical Studies

The role of empirical methods (model learning, data extraction from corpora, evaluation) has greatly increased in importance in both linguistics and computer science over the last fifteen years. TALARIS members have been working for many years on the creation, management and dissemination of linguistic resources reusable by the scientific community, both in the context of implementation of data servers, and in the definition of standardized representation formats like TAG-ML. In addition, they have also worked on the applications of linguistic ideas in multimodal settings and multimedia.

Such work is important to our scientific goals. As we said above, one of the most important points that needs to be understood about logical inference is how its use can be minimized and intelligently guided. Ultimately, such minimization and guidance must be based on empirical observations concerning the kinds of problems that arise repeatedly in natural language applications.

Finally, is should be remarked that the emphasis on empirical studies lends another dimension to what is meant by inference. While much of TALARIS's focus is on symbolic approaches to inference, statistical and probabilistic methods, either on their own or blended with symbolic approaches, are likely to play an increasingly important role in the future. TALARIS researchers are well aware of the importance of such approaches and are interested in exploring their strengths and weaknesses, and where relevant, intend to integrate them into their work.