CTU Events

Prague Computer Science Seminar - A Grammar-Checker for Czech (Karel Oliva)

27 Mar 2014   16:00-19:00

LECTURE ANNOTATION
While an English and a Czech spelling-checker can be based on (almost) identical principles, namely on checking the presence/absence of individual words of the text in a given (albeit long) list of wordforms, a grammar-checker for Czech cannot employ the pattern-matching techniques often used for languages with a fixed word order, mainly due to typological differences: grammatical functions of words in a Czech sentence are expressed by morphological characteristics rather than by word order which is constrained by grammar only in exceptional cases. Thus, setting up a grammar-checker for Czech requires finding new principles and ways how to cope with the task.
In this talk, we shall be, first, concerned with general theoretical considerations of what is a ?patently? ungrammatical construction of (any) language, and, second, with particular techniques for (i) defining, (ii) describing and (iii) detecting errors in a free-word-order language such as Czech.
In the final section of the talk the related but different problem of grammar-correction will be shortly mentioned, as well some theoretical impacts of the whole work.

LECTURER
Doc. RNDr. Karel Oliva, Dr. is an internationally recognized researcher in the area of formal syntax of natural language, taking innovative approaches resulting in commercial applications. He graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University in Prague, held research positions at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia, at the Institute of Computational Linguistics of the University of Saarland in Saarbrücken (Germany), and at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI) in Vienna. He has published over 85 articles in scientific journals and conference proceedings, he was a team leader and co-author of implementations of several software packages (i.a. of a Grammar-checker of Czech for Microsoft Office). He is a director of the Institute of the Czech Language ASCR. He is currently a member of teaching staff of the Faculty of Science of the J. E. Purkynie University in Usti nad Labem.

ABOUT THE PRAGUE COMPUTER SCIENCE SEMINAR
The seminar will take place on the 4th Thursday of each month at 4:00pm (except June, July, August and December) alternately in the buildings of Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University, Karlovo nám. 13, Praha 2 and Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Malostranské nám. 25, Praha 1.
Its program will consist of a one-hour lecture followed by a discussion. The lecture should be based on an (internationally) exceptional or remarkable achievement of the lecturer, presented in a way which is comprehensible and interesting to a broad computer science community. The lectures will be in English.

Place

Karlovo nám. 13, budova E, místnost 107 (Zengerova posluchárna)

Organizer

Přípravný výbor PIS

Contact person

Ing. Veronika Šínová, info@praguecomputerscience.cz, 224 35 7667

More information

http://www.praguecomputerscience.cz/