Invited Talks

In the internet era we face the recurring problem of information overload thus creating a major need for computer tools able to constantly distill, interpret, and organize textual information available on-line effectively. Over the last decade a number of technological advances in the Natural Language Processing field have made it possible to analyze, discover, and machine-interpret huge volumes of online textual information. One clear example of these advances in the field is the nowadays ubiquitous presence of automatic translation tools on the Web. However other NLP technologies have still a fundamental role to play in allowing access to textual information. In this talk I will present an overview of research in the area of Natural Language Processing aiming at facilitating access to textual information online. I will review the role of text summarization, question answering, and information extraction in making textual information more accessible. I will also discuss the issue of access to textual information for people with learning disabilities and present the ongoing work in this area of the Simplex project which aims at producing a text simplification system to facilitate easy access to textual information.