Anton Nijholt, born in Stiens, the Netherlands, in 1946. Ph.D. from the VU University, Amsterdam. Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at Twente University of Technology.
Fellow (1 September 1995 – 30 June 1996)
At NIAS a contribution was made to the theme group “Human Syntactic Processing”. Much was learned from the other theme group members and the contributions made by researchers of Dutch universities and the participants of the workshop on “Human Syntactic Processing” organised by the NIAS theme group. During the NIAS period research on syntactic processing has led to results (and publications) on head corner parsing (efficient syntactic analysis of sentences), unification (leading to a semantic representation) and robustness (error handling). Research results have been obtained in the areas of morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. They have been presented at workshops and conferences devoted to syntax, semantics and pragmatics.
One of the main research themes has been the computational processing of utterances in human dialogues. The dialogues we have investigated have been collected during so called Wizard of Oz Experiments. A database of dialogues has been collected and investigated. This investigation has led to research results on the identification and the prediction of types of utterances in a dialogue (dialogues in the area of a theatre information and booking system). This identification and prediction make it possible to generate a sensible answer to comment or an answer of the user of the system.,/P> Other research has concentrated on the role of humour in men machine communication.