Sunday, July 20, 2008

 

So Long and Thanks for the Diploma

I haven't written here in a long time, but now there is actually something that is worth posting: I have graduated from university!! I submitted my diploma thesis and now I can officially call myself a "Diplom-Informatiker", short form "Dipl.-Inf.".

The thesis title is "Investigations into the Use of Preposition Sense in Semantic Argument Classification". The question that I tried to answer was whether the meaning of prepositions can be used to correctly classify semantic roles in English sentences. For example the semantics of "in the kitchen" and "in the morning" are quite different and the preposition "in" has two different meanings. One problem in natural language processing (NLP) is to find the correct meaning of words. In my case the correct meaning of prepositions. Another problem is to find and classify semantic roles, that is finding the constituents that tell us Who is doing What to Whom and Where and When?

Let's consider the following example:

Daniel ate a sandwich in the kitchen.

The correct meaning or sense of "in" would be "being or appearing enclosed in something else". The semantics of the constituent "in the kitchen" would be a locative adjunctive (ARGM-LOC). The semantics of the preposition is related to the semantics of the dominating phrase. In my thesis, I investigated whether disambiguating the preposition can help to find the correct semantics of the dominating phrase.


Anyway, I submitted my thesis, held my defense and after 6 years ex matriculated myself from the University of Karlsruhe (TH).

So long and thanks for the diploma :)

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Comments:
Congrats! :D hugs :) finally after 6 years :D

:D a ceremonial robe n cap awaits u in singapore :D
 
I never had any doubts about your skills as computer freak (sorry, scientist), but I'm surprised you know that much about English grammar...
 
That is why we are using machine learning (ML) in natural language processing, so we don't have to be perfect in the language ourselves :)

Surprisingly much work is done empirically (including my thesis) where the effect is mostly shown through experiments.
 
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