Selecting Information From Text

Project-manager of the SIFT-project (LRE 62030) for Amsterdam and in charge of a team of 4 researchers and programmers. The aim of the Sift project was to develop a text retrieval system that makes use of distributive semantic representations of words. Distributive representations consist of simple semantic features with weights indicating the relevance of these features for the concept associated with a word. Using these representations equivalence can be measured in a flexible and computationally tractable way. The main result for Amsterdam has been the development of the first version of the Amsterdam Lexicon System (ALS). This is a very efficient and fast object-oriented lexical database system, developed in C and running on Unix, Windows and Macs.