Research projects : past and current

This page provides a listing of the funded research project activities with which I have been involved since joining the University of Bremen. Projects are ordered reverse chronologically by starting date: i.e., most recent first.

Project information for projects in which I was involved before moving to Bremen can be found here.

PROJECTS CURRENTLY RUNNING
propoals currently being prepared or being evaluated...
COMPLETED PROJECTS
DFG 2007-2014

DiaSpace: Dialogic negotiated alignment in spatial communication

Project page

A project of the DFG Sonderforschungsbereich/Transregio (SFB/TR) in the area of spatial reasoning, action and interaction. In this project we are developing formal methods of investigating and computationally formalising spatial dialogues. The principal investigators are: John Bateman, Hui Shi and Thora Tenbrink.

DFG 2007-2014

OntoSpace: Ontologies for Spatial Communication
(phase II)

Project page

A project of the DFG Sonderforschungsbereich/Transregio (SFB/TR) in the area of spatial reasoning, action and interaction. In this project we are developing linguistic and spatial ontologies and constructing formal treatments of the mapping between them, using formal methods and structured logical mechanisms. The principal investigators are: John Bateman and Till Mossakowski. Currently working on the project: Joana Hois and Oliver Kutz.

DAAD 2013-2014 Visual Narrative and Comics A DAAD mobility project for exploring relations between multimodal linguistic and cultural studies approaches to visual narrative.
Uni Bremen

2008-2011

The Textuality of Film
(Textualität des Films)

Project Page

A University of Bremen funded doctoral research group investigating film as a textual phenomenon. 8 PhD research students and a postdoctoral researcher together with 8 faculty members are cooperating to derive a detailed account of the textuality of film in several key areas.
BMBF

2008-2011

"Bild — Film — Diskurs"
(Visuals-Film-Discourse')

Project Page

A cooperative project with TZI (Bremen), Digital Media (Informatics, Bremen) and Visual Communication (Jacobs University Bremen) to investigate the inter-relationship of image-processing and narrative and cultural knowledge.
EU

2008-2011

OASIS "Quality of Life for the Elderly": Open Architecture for Ontologies

Project Page

An EU project developing an ontology-based architecture for connecting services for the elderly. Bremen is responsible here for the development of a heterogeneous framework for ontological modelling and methodologies for ontology development. The application are of OASIS is providing services for the elderly.
DAAD

2005-2007

ALT INFO:
ALgebraic Tools IN Formal Ontology

Project page

This is a collaboration and exchange project with the Laboratory for Applied Ontology (ICST, Trento) funded on the German side by the DAAD under the VIGONI program. The focus of the project is to develop formalisations and formalisation tools for working with spatial and linguistic ontologies. At Bremen this involves a cooperation of SFB/TR8, FB3 and FB10.

Download project description (pdf doc): [English] [Italian]

Uni
Bremen
2001-2006 Using generation grammars for Computer-Aided Language Learning: Spanish / English

A University of Bremen FNK-funded project investigating how grammars developed for natural language generation can be effectively employed for aspects of foreign language learning/teaching. The project constitutes a major part of the PhD research of Juan Rafael Zamarano.

The final state of the Spanish natural language resources can be found here.

DFG 2003-2006

SharC: Shared Control with
Dialog (phase I)

Project page

A project of the DFG Sonderforschungsbereich/Transregio (SFB/TR) in the area of spatial reasoning, action and interaction. In this project we are exploring how dialog can be used to avoid mode confusion problems and how formal methods can contribute to dialog modelling. The principal investigators in the first phase of the SFB were: Bernd Krieg-Brückner (Informatik, FB3) and John Bateman. In addition, Tilman Vierhuff worked on linguistic aspects of the project, Shi Hui on dialog modelling with formal methods, and Robert Ross on agent-based architectures for HRI and integration. The language technology and dialogue components of this project are now being carried out in the project DiaSpace (see above). SharC continues with multimodal, multi user-group assistance separately.
DFG 2003-2006

OntoSpace: Ontologies for Spatial Communication
(phase I)

Project page

 

A project of the DFG Sonderforschungsbereich/Transregio (SFB/TR) in the area of spatial reasoning, action and interaction. In this project we are developing linguistic and spatial ontologies and motivating the mapping between them on the basis of detailed empirical experiments involving linguistic interaction. The principal investigators are: John Bateman, Kerstin Fischer (FB10) and Reinhard Moratz (Informatik, FB3). Currently working on the project: Thora Tenbrink on spatial language and Scott Farrar on ontologies. OntoSpace continues in the second phase of the SFB with an exclusive focus on ontology.

Short description in German

EU 2002-2003 EDEN: Electronic Democracy European Network This EU-funded project is exploring issues of electronic democracy. Part of this involves the development of natural language processing technology. Our involvement concerned the provision of an analysis component and lexicon for German that was incorporated in the applications constructed by the project.
ESRC 1998-2002

GeM: Genre and Multimodality

Project page
Book on project results

A British ESRC-funded project investigating the ways in which different document genres use layout, graphics and text in combination to communicate. The main results of the project are an annotation scheme for preparing multimodal corpora. The scheme, its documentation and other publications, as well as the current state of the corpus collected can be found on the project website.
EU 1997-2000 Agile: Automatic generation of instructions in the languages of Eastern Europe A EU-funded cooperative project that produced a prototype system for generating fragments of instruction manuals automatically in Bulgarian, Czech, and Russian. Project publications as well as the prototype system can be downloaded from the central project website. Illustrations of the grammars and their coverage can be found in the generation grammar bank.