Alistair Willis

The Open University · School of Computing and Communications

In the context of deteriorating relations with ‘Western’ states, Russia’s state-funded international broadcasters are often understood as malign propaganda rather than as agents of soft power. Subsequently, there is a major credibility gap between how Russian state media represents itself to the world and how it is actually perceived by overseas pu...

The Russian state-funded international broadcaster RT (formerly Russia Today) has attracted much attention as a purveyor of Russian propaganda. To date, most studies of RT have focused on its broadcast, website, and social media content, with little research on its audiences. Through a data-driven application of network science and other computatio...

Written communication skills are considered to be highly desirable in computing graduates. However, many students in the discipline do not have a background in which these skills have been developed, and the skills are often not well developed within a computing curriculum. For some multidisciplinary topics, such as data science, the range of pot...

Throughout 2017, the Russian state broadcaster, RT (formerly Russia Today), commemorated the centenary of the 1917 revolution with a social media re-enactment. Centred on Twitter, the 1917LIVE project involved over 90 revolution-era characters tweeting in real time as if the 1917 revolution was happening live on social media. This article is based...

Rating and Likert scales are widely used in evaluation experiments to measure the quality of Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems. We review the use of rating and Likert scales for NLG evaluation tasks published in NLG specialized conferences over the last ten years (135 papers in total). Our analysis brings to light a number of deviations fro...

This paper pays attention to the immense and febrile field of digital image files which picture the smart city as they circulate on the social media platform Twitter. The paper considers tweeted images as an affective field in which flow and colour are especially generative. This luminescent field is territorialised into different, emergent forms o...

Recent research has shown that the performance of search personalization depends on the richness of user profiles which normally represent the user's topical interests. In this paper, we propose a new embedding approach to learning user profiles, where users are embedded on a topical interest space. We then directly utilize the user profiles for se...

Recent research has shown the usefulness of using collective user interaction data (e.g., query logs) to recommend query modification suggestions for Intranet search. However, most of the query suggestion approaches for Intranet search follow an ``one size fits all'' strategy, whereby different users who submit an identical query would get the same...

Recent research has shown that mining and modelling search tasks helps improve the performance of search personalisation. Some approaches have been proposed to model a search task using topics discussed in relevant documents, where the topics are usually obtained from human-generated online ontology such as Open Directory Project. A limitation of t...

Stylistic composition is a creative musical activity, in which students as well as renowned composers write according to the style of another composer or period. We describe and evaluate two computational models of stylistic composition, called Racchman-Oct2010 (random constrained chain of Markovian nodes, October 2010) and Racchmaninof-Oct2010 (Ra...

The performance of search personalisation largely depends on how to build user profiles effectively. Many approaches have been developed to build user profiles using topics discussed in relevant documents, where the topics are usually obtained from human-generated online ontology such as Open Directory Project. The limitation of these approaches is...

Despite an emerging interest in the application of dynamic computer music systems to computer games, currently there are no commonly accepted approaches to empirically evaluating game music systems. In this paper we pose four questions that researchers could assess in order to evaluate different aspects of a game music system. They focus on the mus...

Recent research has shown that the performance of search engines can be improved by enriching a user's personal profile with information about other users with shared interests. In the existing approaches, groups of similar users are often statically determined, e.g., based on the common documents that users clicked. However, these static grouping...

Current game music systems typically involve the playback of prerecorded audio tracks which are crossfaded in response to game events such as level changes. However, crossfading can limit the expressive power of musical transitions, and can make fine grained structural variations difficult to achieve. We therefore describe an alternative approach i...

The use of tacit knowledge is a common feature in everyday communication. It allows people to communicate effectively without forcing them to make everything tediously and painstakingly explicit, provided they all share a common understanding of whatever is not made explicit. If this latter criterion does not hold, confusion and misunderstanding wi...

Education is a major force for economic and social wellbeing. Despite high aspirations, education at all levels can be expensive and ineffective. Three Grand Challenges are identified: (1) enable people to learn orders of magnitude more effectively, (2) enable people to learn at orders of magnitude less cost, and (3) demonstrate success by exemplar...

Stakeholders frequently use speculative language when they need to convey their requirements with some degree of uncertainty. Due to the intrinsic vagueness of speculative language, speculative requirements risk being misunderstood, and related uncertainty overlooked, and may benefit from careful treatment in the requirements engineering process. I...

Many tasks in natural language processing require that sentences be classified from a set of discrete interpretations. In these cases, there appear to be great benefits in using hybrid systems which apply multiple analyses to the test cases. In this paper, we examine a general principle for building hybrid systems, based on combining the results of...

We describe the Open University team's submission to the 2011 i2b2/VA/Cincinnati Medical Natural Language Processing Challenge, Track 2 Shared Task for sentiment analysis in suicide notes. This Shared Task focused on the development of automatic systems that identify, at the sentence level, affective text of 15 specific emotions from suicide notes....

This paper discusses how we intend to take forward the vision of a Bibliography of Life in the ViBRANT project. The underlying principle of the Bibliography is to provide taxonomists and others with a freely accessible bibliography covering the whole of life. Such a bibliography has been achieved for specific study areas within taxonomy, but not fo...

How do people compose music? Can computers, with statistics, create a mazurka that cannot be distinguished from a Chopin original?Tom Collins, Robin Laney, Alistair Willis and Paul H. Garthwaite make music with Markov models.

Many requirements documents are written in natural language (NL). However, with the flexibility of NL comes the risk of introducing unwanted ambiguities in the requirements and misunderstandings between stakeholders. In this paper, we describe an automated approach to identify potentially nocuous ambiguity, which occurs when text is interpreted dif...

This study relates various quantifiable characteristics of a musical pattern to subjective assessments of a pattern's salience. Via score analysis and listening, twelve music undergraduates examined excerpts taken from Chopin's mazurkas. They were instructed to rate already-discovered patterns, giving high ratings to patterns that they thought were...

This paper presents an approach to automatically identify potentially nocuous ambiguities, which occur when text is interpreted differently by different readers of requirements written in natural language. We extract a set of anaphora ambiguities from a range of requirements documents, and collect multiple human judgments on their interpretations....

Natural language is prevalent in requirements documents. However, ambiguity is an intrinsic phenomenon of natural language, and is therefore present in all such documents. Ambiguity occurs when a sentence can be interpreted differently by different readers. In this paper, we describe an automated approach for characterizing and detecting so-called...

Nocuous ambiguity occurs when a linguistic expression is interpreted differently by different readers in a given context. We present an approach to automatically identify nocuous ambiguity that is likely to lead to misunderstandings among readers. Our model is built on a machine learning architecture. It learns from a set of heuristics each of whic...

A metric for evaluating the creativity of a music-generating system is presented, the objective being to generate mazurka-style music that inherits salient patterns from an original excerpt by Frédéric Chopin. The metric acts as a filter within our overall system, causing rejection of generated passages that do not inherit salient patterns, until a...

We present the ABLE document collection, which consists of a set of annotated volumes of the Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). These follow our work on automating the markup of scanned copies of the biodiversity literature, for the purpose of supporting working taxonomists. We consider an enhanced TEI XML markup language, which is u...

We consider the problem of intra-opus pattern discovery, that is, the task of discovering patterns of a specified type within a piece of music. A music analyst undertook this task for works by Domenico Scarlattti and Johann Sebastian Bach, forming a benchmark of 'target' patterns. The performance of two existing algorithms and one of our own creati...

Nocuous ambiguity occurs when a linguistic expression is interpreted differently by different readers in a given context. We present an approach to automatically identify nocuous ambiguity that is likely to lead to misunderstandings among readers. Our model is built on a machine learning architecture. It learns from a set of heuristics each of whic...

Natural language is prevalent in requirements documents. However, ambiguity is an intrinsic phenomenon of natural language, and is therefore present in all such documents. Ambiguity occurs when a sentence can be interpreted differently by different readers. In this paper, we describe an automated approach for characterizing and detecting so-called...

Tacit knowledge in requirements documents can lead to miscommunication between software engineers and other stakeholders. One way in which the presence of tacit knowledge is signalled in text is by linguistic presuppositions. In this paper, we present a brief introduction to tacit knowledge, presuppositions and the links between them. Our aim is to...

The importance of tacit knowledge in Requirements Engineering (RE) is widely acknowledged. While valuable work has developed techniques to expose sources of tacit knowledge during requirements elicitation, such techniques are not universally applied and tacit knowledge, continues to negatively affect the quality of the requirements. In this positio...

We present the concept of nocuous ambiguity, which occurs when text is interpreted differently by different readers. In contrast, text exhibits innocuous ambiguity if different readers interpret it in the same way, even though structural or semantic analyses suggest that multiple interpretations may be possible. We collect multiple human judgements...

In this paper we present heuristics for resolving coordination ambiguities. We test the hypothesis that the most likely reading of a coordination can be predicted using word distribution information from a generic corpus. Our heuristics are based upon the relative frequency of the coordination in the corpus, the distributional similarity of the coo...

We present a novel technique that automatically alerts authors of requirements to the presence of potentially dangerous ambiguities. We first establish the notion of nocuous ambiguities, which are those that are likely to lead to misunderstandings. We test our approach on coordination ambiguities, which occur when words such as and or are used. Our...

We propose a formal system for representing the available readings of sentences displaying quantifier scope ambiguity, in which partial scopes may be expressed. We show that using a theory of scope availability based upon the functionargument structure of a sentence allows a deterministic, polynomial time test for the availability of a reading, whi...

A long standing problem within computational semantics is the correct analysis of ambiguous sentences; that is, sentences which may have more than one meaning. Given a sentence displaying quantifier scope ambiguity, such as Every man loves a woman, part of the problem of representing the sentence’s meaning is to distinguish between the two possible...

This project investigates various proposals which have been made to improve the efficiency of a chart parser. Steel & De Roeck suggest that the efficiency of a parser could be improved if the grammar-writer is allowed to mark certain rules in the grammar to be used top-down and others to be used bottom-up. Further suggestions to improve efficiency...

In this paper we present a novel approach that automatically alerts authors of requirements specifications to the presence of potentially dangerous ambiguities in their text. We first establish the notion of "nocuous" ambiguities, i.e. those that are likely to lead to misunderstandings. We focus on coordination ambiguity, which occurs when words su...

In this paper we present some heuristics for resolving coordination ambiguities. This type of ambiguity is one of the most pervasive and challenging. We test the hypothesis that the most likely reading of a coordination can be predicted using word distribution information from a generic corpus. The measures that we use are: the relative frequency o...

Accurately capturing the quantifier scope behaviour of coordinated NPs can be problematic for underspecification systems that define constraints over semantic constructors. We present an extension to a hole-semantics like language that allows a natural representation of coordinated NPs, and a translation from partial scope requirements into constra...

A collection of biodiversity literature comprising TEI XML documents enhanced with taxonomic information. The collection consists of a total of 4,504 marked up pages, with about 1.6 million words.

Software used to automatically create the ABLE corpus (a collection of biodiversity literature comprising TEI XML documents enhanced with taxonomic information) from the OCR text of scanned biodiversity literature.