The NIL acronym (Natural Interaction based on Language) identifies a group of researchers and practitioners whose interests converge towards the development of interfaces based on language for modern day IT applications for modifying or finding information, issuing commands, or present output results in a way easy to understand.
Various Artificial Intelligence techniques contribute towards this goal. The mainstay of NIL is obviously a strong Natural Language Processing component. However, the complexities of language interactions require the use of additional techniques of Knowledge Representation, Expert Systems, Case-Based Reasoning, Evolutionary Algorithms, User Modeling and Computational Creativity.
NIL arises in 2005 to provide a minimal infrastructure to house colaborative projects between researchers at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Nevertheless, it is open to contributions from researchers affiliated at other institutions if they are interested in the stated goals. At the same point, NIL is born with the overall goal of developing the technologies that it researchs on to the point where they can be used for practical applications. For this reason, we are always on the look out for opportunities to test the applicability of our work in real life situations.
Ing. Rodrigo García Sánchez, from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, visited Madrid for a research colaboration with the NIL group from February to July 2006.
NIL researcher Raquel Hervás carried out a research visit at the Creative Systems Lab, at the University of Coimbra, Portugal , within the framework of Spanish-Portuguese Integrated Action HP2003-0068, from 11th January to 11th February.
NIL researchers Raquel Hervás and Pablo Gervás from UCM visit the Creative Systems Lab, at the University of Coimbra, Portugal , within the framework of Spanish-Portuguese Integrated Action HP2003-0068, from 5th to 8th December 2005.
Charles Callaway, from the University of Edimburgh, to give a talk at UCM on "Dialogue, Discourse Markers, and other Linguistic Elements that Improve Narrative Generation", Sala de Grados, Facultad de Informática, 11:30.
NIL kick-off workshop to present ongoing research. The following NIL members described their current work:
NIL researchers Federico Peinado and Pablo Gervás from UCM visit the Creative Systems Lab, at the University of Coimbra, Portugal , within the framework of Spanish-Portuguese Integrated Action HP2003-0068, from 7th-13th October 2005.
The Second Joint workshop on Computational Creativity takes place as part of the workshop programme of IJCAI 2005. This workshop is organised by Pablo Gervás (NIL, UCM), Alison Pease (University of Edimburgh), and Tony Veale (University College Dublin).
Federico Peinado made a research stay at Forschergruppe Narratologie, Hamburg Universität at Hamburg, Germany. He worked with PD Dr. Jan Christoph Meister on his Story Generation Algorithms project (23rd May 2005 / 3rd July 2005)
The WASP family of automatic poets is presented at the Feria del Libro de Madrid. A brief presentation on poetry generated by computers was followed by a live demonstration of how the WASPos convert a message provided by the user into formal Spanish verse. An informal chat followed, with the participation of (human) poet María Sáinz.
This is what the press had to say about the event:
Dr. Rafael Pérez y Pérez, developer of the MEXICA story-telling system, visited the Facultad de Informática for a working meeting with NIL researchers. The aim of the meeting was to consider possible future lines of colaboration between the MEXICA and ProtoPropp projects.
