Dave Howcroft
Graduate Student
Dept. of Linguistics
Telephone: 614.285.4368
Email: [my first name] --at-- davehowcroft.com
Find me on: LinkedIn ||| Twitter ||| Facebook ||| Academia.edu
my most recent resume/cv as: HTML ||| PDF
Graduate Student
Dept. of Linguistics
Telephone: 614.285.4368
Email: [my first name] --at-- davehowcroft.com
Find me on: LinkedIn ||| Twitter ||| Facebook ||| Academia.edu
my most recent resume/cv as: HTML ||| PDF
I am a second year pursuing a PhD in linguistics at the Ohio State University. I am currently preparing to apply for an NSF grant to increase information accessibility for those with disabilities and/or lower literacy.
My research focuses on automatic text simplification, a problem at the nexus of semantics, natural language generation, and psycholinguistics. The ultimate goal is to produce a system which can (1) extract a semantic representation from natural text, (2) generate paraphrases from such a representation, and (3) rank paraphrases based upon psycholinguistically-motivated metrics of complexity. As I enter my second year at the Ohio State University, I am focusing initially on issues related to NLG and semantics as I try to determine the scope of my graduate research and its application to this task.
So what is linguistics anyway? There are plenty of sources out there you can find to answer this question for yourself, but among the best breakdowns I've seen is this two-page introduction Basic Facts about Linguistics (PDF) written by one of our faculty at Ohio State, Carl Pollard.