Harald Trost

IMKAI NLU

[Career] [Activities] [Projects] [Research Interests] [Publications] [Teaching] [Coordinates] [Offenlegung]

I am ...

 ... born and living in Vienna, married, and I have two children.

... Associate Professor at the Section for Artifical Intelligence at the Center for Medical Statistics, Informatics and Intelligent Systems (CeMSIIS), Medical University of Vienna, Austria.


Education

1978     

 diploma in computer science from the Vienna University of Technology

1983     

 doctorate with a thesis on terminological knowledge representation from the Vienna University of Technology

1991     

 "Habilitation" in the field of Artificial Intelligence with a thesis on computational morphology at the University of Vienna.

Professional
Career

1978 - 1989     

 research assistant at the Department of Medical Cybernetics and Artifical Intelligence

since 1984     

 head of the Language Technology group at the ÖFAI

1989 - 1991     

 senior researcher in the DISCO project at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Saarbrücken, Germany.

since 1991     

 Associate Professor at the Department of Medical Cybernetics and Artifical Intelligence of the University of Vienna.

since 2004     

 the Institute of Medical Cybernetics and Artifical Intelligence forms part of the Center for Brain Research of the Medical University of Vienna.

since 2010     

 the (renamed) Section for Artifical Intelligence forms part of the Center for Medical Statistics, Informatics and Intelligent Systems of the Medical University of Vienna.
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Professional
Activities

1981 - 1988     

 Editor of the ÖGAI-Journal.

1982 - 1984     

 Representative of ÖGAI in the European Coordinating Committee on Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI).

since 1987     

 Member of the editorial board of the international journal Applied Artificial Intelligence, published by Taylor & Francis.

1992 - 1999     

 Austrian representative in the WP 6 - Language Engineering (formerly LRE) of the Telematics programme of the European Union.

1994 - 1997     

 President of the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence (ÖGAI).

since 1996     

 Member of the editorial board of the electronic journal WEB-SLS European Student Journal of Language and Speech.

since 2007     

 Coordinator for Block 7 - Science and Medicine of the Medical Curriculum at the Medical University Vienna.

since 2007     

 Deputy Curriculum Director for the Master Study Medical Informatics at the Medical University Vienna.
Back I have been program committee member in many international conferences--most recently for EACL'95, ACL/EACL'97, where I also acted as workshop chair--and KONVENS'2000. I have organized and co-organized a number of workshops and conferences. The most recent one was Dialects - Workshop on Algorithms and Resources for Modelling of Dialects and Language Varieties at EMNLP'2011 in Edinburgh.

Projects

 I am supervising--and contributing to--a number of projects. Some current and recently finished projects are:
       Machine-Learning Techniques for Modeling of Language Varieties
Using language varieties in speech based communication enables computer systems to reflect the socio-cultural identity of users. Current language technology cannot deliver on this, yet. We will develop algorithms capable of capturing and reproducing all major idiosyncracies displayed by a language variety, be they syntactic, lexical or phonological. Standard German and Viennese varieties serve as a test bed for the realization and exploration of our techniques.
       MAGNIFICENT (Multifaceted Analysis of News Articles for Intelligent User- and Context-Sensitive Presentation)
Little is known about why readers of online newspapers prefer some articles over others. Content accounts only for about 40% of a story's satisfaction rating. The remaining 60% are diverse: readability, style, story type, visual complexity, photographs, appeal. MAGNIFICENT aims at gaining deep insight into both the relevant parameters of stories and the adaptive training of user profiles.
       AUREX/W (Automated retrieval and extraction of web contents)
Today, information retrieval - e.g. by using Google - is a routine task. Companies, however, usually do not search for documents as such, but for subject specific information. These inquiries are currently mostly done by hand, using search engines only for preselection. AUREX/W develops tools for information extraction from unstructured websites, thus making information extraction methods applicable to a significant larger portion of the web.
       SPARC (Semantic Phonetic Automatic Reconstruction of Dictations)
An important application for speech recognition is automating document creation in institutions with a large dictation volume. To improce quality, systems must move away from simple transcriptions of spoken utterances to full document creation. By making use of explicit semantic information, SPARC contributes to this new dimension in automatic dictation.
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Research
Interests


Originally, my research interest in natural language stems from work in Artificial Intelligence, namely in dialog systems. Over the years I have been working in several areas of Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics. Areas of current interest to me are:
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  • Computational Morphology
  • Integration of Syntax and Morphology
  • Ontology Engineering
  • natural language based multi-modal man-machine interfaces.

Publications

 Since the late seventies I have written, coauthored and edited more than 100 publications. A list of these publications and (if available) links to online versions can be found here, people writing LaTeX and wanting to cite me can get this list formatted as bibitems.
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Teaching


I have been teaching courses on a number of topics in Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence. Currently, I give the following courses:
The courses form part of the Medical Informatics curriculum at the Medical University of Vienna and/or Informatics Curricula at the University of Vienna.

I am also involved in the Medical Curriculum at my home university.

Back In addition, I am supervising student projects and masters' and PhD theses in my capacity as associate professor at the Section for Artificial Intelligence of the Center for Medical Stitistics, Informatics and Intelligence Systems, Medical University of Vienna.

I have also taught courses for more advanced audiences on various international events:

  • KIFS-91 (9. Frühjahrsschule Künstliche Intelligenz)
  • Herbstschule Kognitionswissenschaft; Saarbrücken, 1992
  • KIFS-92 (10. Frühjahrsschule Künstliche Intelligenz)
  • ELSNET Summer School on Prosody; London, 1993.
  • Summer School on Contemporary Topics in Computational Linguistics; Batak Lake, Bulgaria, 1997.
  • PhD School in Language and Speech Technologies; Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Fall 2006.

Coordinates

 Address:
Harald Trost
Section for Artificial Intelligence
Center for Medical Statistics, Informatics and Intelligent Systems
Medical University of Vienna
Freyung 6
A-1010 Vienna, Austria
Phone:
+43/1/40160 36321
Fax:
+43/1/40160 936300
Email: harald DOT trost AT meduniwien DOT ac DOT at

Offenlegung

 Offenlegung nach Par.25 Mediengesetz:
Medieninhaber / für den Inhalt dieser Seite verantwortlich: Harald Trost, Wien
last modified: 16-May-11