New members: Salvador de la Puente and Daniel Dionne
Salvador de la Puente and Daniel Dionne join NIL group.
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.
Salvador de la Puente and Daniel Dionne join NIL group.
Pablo Gervás, Raquel Hervás and Carlos León participate in the Referring Expression Generation Challenge 2008 hold in conjunction with the 5th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2008), from 12th June to 14th June 2008.
Carlos León is among the winners of an award by Caja de Burgos for his PhD proposal, getting a grant as a prize.
Alaukik Aggarwal, from Indraprastha University (India), carried out a Summer Internship with the NIL reserach group, from June 2008 until July 2008.
Federico Peinado has finally obtained the PhD degree in Computer Engineering, happily increasing the number of doctors in our group.
Federico Peinado made a research stay at School of Computing, University of Teesside at Middlesbrough, UK. He worked with Prof. Ph.D. Marc Cavazza and the IVE group on a new Interactive Storytelling project, from 25th February 2008 until 27th August 2008.
NIL researcher Pablo Gervás took part in a round table "Poesía al otro lado de la red", in the Círculo de Bellas Artes, as part of the cycle organised by Editorial Devenir.
Ing. Juan Manuel Alvarado López, from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, visited Madrid for a research colaboration with the NIL group, from April to September 2008.
NIL researcher Pablo Gervás attends the Segundo Encuentro de Creatividad, Cognición y Computación, which took place in Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Unidad Cuajimalpa, México DF, México (7th-15th December 2007). This is what the local press said about it:
NIL researchers Pablo Gervás and Raquel Hervás take part in the First NLG Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge on Attribute Selection for Referring Expressions Generation held in Copenhagen in conjunction with the UCNLG+MT Workshop.