Matt Lease Awarded Grant for Computational Research on Language Grounding

The New York Community Trust has awarded a 1-year, $73,000 grant to Professors Jason Baldridge (principal investigator) and Katrin Erk and Matt Lease (co-principal investigators) in continued support of their project to develop algorithms and applications that connect language to time and space. The main focus of the project in the past two years has been document geotagging and toponym resolution on Wikipedia, Twitter, and Civil War-era texts. The next phase will address automatic markup of documents in crowdsourced crisis management efforts. The ideas and theoretical developments are put into practice using TextGrounder, a system that automatically interprets references to times and places in free text in multiple languages and uses that information to visualize texts.

Jason Baldridge - "Text Geolocation and Dating: Light-Weight Language Grounding" from Chris Callison-Burch on Vimeo.