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Contact information:School of Informatics2 Buccleuch Place Edinburgh EH8 9LW email: Michael dot White at ed.ac.uk |
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I've recently completed a stint as a Research Fellow on the COMIC project (COnversational Multimodal Interactions with Computers) in the Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems, and have now taken up a faculty position as an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at "The" (!) Ohio State University.
Our overall goal in the COMIC consortium was to develop next-generation collaborative problem solving software; in Edinburgh, I worked with Mary Ellen Foster, Johanna Moore, Jon Oberlander, John Lee and Jean Carletta on the output side of the system, where our focus was on generating user-tailored recommendations and comparisons in a multimodal dialogue context. I also contributed to the CrAg project (Critical Agent Dialogue) with Carsten Brockmann, Amy Isard, Jon Oberlander and Johanna Moore, where our goal has been to develop and demonstrate techniques for personality-specific generation.
Prior to joining the research staff here, I worked for many years at CoGenTex, Inc., a small company dedicated to developing commercial natural language generation software, as well as advancing research in NLG. My CoGenTex page lists the highlights of my R&D activities at CoGenTex, and includes links to all my CGT papers. See the Recommender page for a description of CGT's recommendation software (licensed to Active Decisions), as well as instructions for how to see it in action on the web.
Before joining the CGT crew, I obtained a Ph.D. in computational linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, working under the supervision of Mark Steedman. My dissertation concerned the semantics of aspect and its role in interpretation, and focused on some logical problems with current accounts of aspectual composition. I followed up this work with Sandro Zucchi, leading to an L&P paper entitled Twigs, Sequences and the Temporal Constitution of Predicates.
As an enabling technology for COMIC, FLIGHTS, CrAg and other dialogue projects, I've been working on the OpenCCG open source realizer for Combinatory Categorial Grammar, initially with Jason Baldridge. A baseline release of OpenCCG is now available from the OpenCCG page hosted by SourceForge.
Mary Ellen Foster and Michael White. 2005. Assessing the Impact of Adaptive Generation in the COMIC Multimodal Dialogue System. In Proc. of the IJCAI-05 Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical Dialogue Systems.
Carsten Brockmann, Amy Isard, Jon Oberlander, and Michael White. 2005. Modelling alignment for affective dialogue. In Proc. of the UM-05 Workshop on Adapting the Interaction Style to Affective Factors.
Michael White, Mary Ellen Foster, Jon Oberlander, and Ash Brown. 2005. Using Facial Feedback to Enhance Turn-Taking in a Multimodal Dialogue System. In Proc. of the HCI International 2005 Thematic Session on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction.
Michael White. 2005. Designing an Extensible API for Integrating Language Modeling and Realization. In Proc. ACL-05 Workshop on Software.
Mary Ellen Foster, Michael White, Andrea Setzer, and Roberta Catizone. 2005. Generating Multimodal Output in the COMIC Dialogue System. ACL 2005 Demo Session. (Poster [A0 PDF])
Michael White. 2004. Efficient Realization of Coordinate Structures in Combinatory Categorial Grammar. To appear in Research on Language and Computation.
Mary Ellen Foster and Michael White. 2004. Techniques for Text Planning with XSLT. In Proc. of the 4th NLPXML Workshop.
Michael White. 2004. Reining in CCG Chart Realization. In Proc. of the 3rd International Conference on Natural Language Generation.
Rachel Baker, Robert A. J. Clark, and Michael White. 2004. Synthesising Contextually Appropriate Intonation in Limited Domains. In Proc. of the 5th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop.
Johanna Moore, Mary Ellen Foster, Oliver Lemon, and Michael White. 2004. Generating Tailored, Comparative Descriptions in Spoken Dialogue. In Proc. of the 17th International FLAIRS Conference.
Michael White and Jason Baldridge. 2003. Adapting Chart Realization to CCG. In Proc. of the 9th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation.