Sebastian Varges

**January 2011: I moved!**
Background     Research Interests     Projects     Ph.D. thesis    Publications 

Dr. Sebastian Varges
Department of Information and Communication Technology
University of Trento
Room D11, via Sommarive 14
38050 Povo di Trento, Italy

phone:    +39  0461 88 2081
email: varges  +  AT + disi.unitn.it


Background:  I am a Marie Curie Senior Fellow at the Adaptive Multimodal Information and  Interfaces  Research Lab at the University of Trento (Italy), where I work on the ADAMACH project.  Until December 2006, I was a Research Engineer at the Computational Semantics Lab at the CSLI, Stanford University.   Before that, I was at the ITRI, University of Brighton where I worked on the TUNA project.  I conducted my Ph.D. research at the ICCS, University of Edinburgh on "Instance-based Natural Language Generation".  I obtained an undergraduate degree in Computational Linguistics from Saarbrücken University and a Master's degree from the University of Düsseldorf.

I am a board member of the Special Interest Group in Natural Language Generation (SIGGEN) from 2009-2013.

Research Interests (there are many, but here is a selection):
  • Dialogue systems, natural language generation (NLG), and natural language processing in general:  NLG may turn out to be the key for natural language understanding, especially in the context of dialogue systems, if we want to understand what the other has said - and why.
  • Combining rule-based and machine learning techniques such as instance-based learning and reinforcement learning:  can we combine the strengths of both but avoid their disadvantages? I am particularly interested in working with small amounts of training data and rule systems of limited complexity.
  • Lexicalized grammar formalisms, and their application to dialogue (beyond the syntactic level).
  • The role of content and task knowledge in dialogue processing.
  • NLP system development, programming systems, and annotation environments: we are still developing most research software from scratch - what languages and programming environments are most suitable for collaborative software development?
Current and past projects:
  • Adaptive Multimodal Information and  Interfaces  Research Lab (ADAMACH project) at the University of Trento (Italy):  Jan 2006 - current:  we are developing new models of dialogue and speech processing, that, for example, learn during interaction. 
  • Computational Semantics Lab at the CSLI, Stanford University (June 2005 - Dec  2006):  I worked on the generation component of an In-car Multi-agent Dialogue System that is based on the CSLI dialogue manager.  The system operates in three domains of increasing difficulty:  1) playing songs from an MP3 database, 2) discussing what restaurants are available in the area, 3) generating route descriptions.
  • TUNA (Oct. 2003 - May 2005):  In the TUNA project at the former ITRI, Brighton, we developed algorithms for referring expression generation (GRE). I was particularly interested in applying the "overgeneration and ranking" approach I had previously used for surface realization in NLG to a higher-level content determination task such as GRE.
  • BEETLE (University of Edinburgh, Jan. - Sept. 2003):  I developed an XSLT-based generator for the BEETLE tutorial dialogue system.
  • M-Piro (University of Edinburgh):  I worked on enhancing the expressive capabilities of M-Piro, the Java version of the ILEX generator, for a few months in 2002.
  • Computational Linguistics project at the University of Düsseldorf, headed by James Kilbury: between 1994 and 1998 I
Ph.D. thesis:
Publications:
  • 2006. Fuliang Weng, Sebastian Varges, Badri Raghunathan, Florin Ratiu, Heather Pon-Barry, Brian Lathrop, Qi Zhang, Tobias Scheideck, Harry Bratt, Kui Xu, Matthew Purver, Rohit Mishra, Madhuri Raya, Stanley Peters, Yao Meng, Lawrence Cavedon and Liz Shriberg: CHAT: A Conversational Helper for Automotive Tasks.  Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech), Pittsburgh, PA, September 2006.
  • 2004. Johanna Moore, Kaska Porayska-Pomsta, Sebastian Varges, and Claus Zinn: Generating Tutorial Feedback with Affect. Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Symposium Conference (FLAIRS), AAAI Press, 2004.
  • 2001.  Sebastian Varges and Chris Mellish: Instance-based Natural Language Generation. Proceedings of the 2nd Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-01), pages 1-8. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. [also available as postscript]