FACULTY

Biography

Graeme Hirst's research interests cover a range of topics in computational linguistics and natural language processing, including lexical semantics, the resolution of ambiguity in text, the preservation of author's style in machine translation, recovering from misunderstanding and non-understanding in human-computer communication, and linguistic constraints on knowledge-representation systems. His present research includes the problem of near-synonymy in lexical choice in language generation; detecting markers of Alzheimer's disease in the works of literary writers; and applications of lexical chaining as an indicator of semantic distance in texts. Hirst was the founding editor of Canadian Artificial Intelligence, and serves as Book Review Editor of Computational Linguistics. He is the author of two monographs: Anaphora in Natural Language Understanding (Springer-Verlag, 1981) and Semantic Interpretation and the Resolution of Ambiguity (Cambridge University Press, 1987). He is the recipient of two awards for excellence in teaching. He has supervised more than 35 theses and dissertations, four of which have been published as books. He was elected Chair of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics for 2004-05 and Treasurer of the Association for 2008-2012.

Keywords
Computational linguistics, natural language processing, style in language, question-answering, information extraction, lexical semantics, semantic distance, word prediction, misunderstanding, text classification.