Bill Woods

William A. Woods (William.Woods@East.Sun.COM)

Principal Scientist, Distinguished Engineer, Sun Microsystems Laboratories.

(For general information about Sun Microsystems Labs, see http://www.sun.com/research/)

Interests

• My current interests focus around the use of knowledge representation and natural language processing technology to help people find information in online material. Specifically, I am focusing on the "paraphrase problem" -- the situation that arises when the terminology used in the request is different from that used by the author. Research questions involve discovering what information is required to make a connection between the terminology of the request and that of the author and how this information can be organized and used efficiently to find information. I have been exploring the use of structured conceptual taxonomies for organizing and using semantic relationships among concepts to find specific passages of interest in response to requests. This research theme is being pursued by the Knowledge Technology Group at Sun Microsystems Laboratories - Boston. You can learn more at http://www.sun.com/research/knowledge.

  For a recent article on this technology, see: "Natural Language Technology in Precision Content Retrieval," by Ambroziak and Woods (available online at: http://www.sun.com/research/techrep/1998/abstract-69.html).

  This technology was reviewed (together with some work at the MIT Media Lab) by James Fallows, in the April 1996 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. The article, entitled "Navigating the Galaxies," is available on-line at: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96apr/computer/computer.htm

• Other interests include knowledge representation and reasoning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence in general.

Address

Selected Publications

• "Natural Language Technology in Precision Content Retrieval," (with Jacek Ambroziak), proceedings of the International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Industrial Applications (NLP+IA 98), August 18-21, 1998, Moncton, New Brunswick, CANADA. (reprint available online at: http://www.sun.com/research/techrep/1998/abstract-69.html)

• "Knowledge Management Needs Effective Search Technology," Sun Journal, March, 1998. (available online at: http://www.sun.com/sun-journal/V2N1/03_feat2a.html)

• Conceptual Indexing: A Better Way to Organize Knowledge, Technical Report SMLI TR-97-61, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Mountain View, CA, April, 1997. (available online at: http://www.sun.com/research/techrep/1997/abstract-61.html)

• "Finding Information on the Web: A Knowledge Representation Approach," presented at the Fourth International World Wide Web Conference, Boston, MA (December 1995) (For a summary, see: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/conferences/www95/woods.html)

• "The KL-ONE Family," (with James Schmolze), Computers & Mathematics with Applications, Vol 23, Nos 1-5, 1992, pp 133-177, Reprinted in Fritz Lehmann (ed.), Semantic Networks in Artificial Intelligence, Pergamon Press, 1992.

• "Understanding Subsumption and Taxonomy: A Framework for Progress," in John Sowa (ed.), Principles of Semantic Networks: Explorations in the Representation of Knowledge, San Mateo:Morgan Kaufmann, 1991.

• "Don't Blame the Tool," Computational Intelligence, Vol. 3, No. 3, (August, 1987), pp. 228-237. (An essay on the limitations of first-order logic as a foundation for knowledge representation.)

• "Important Issues in Knowledge Representation," Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 74, No. 10 (October, 1986), pp 1322-1334. Reprinted in Peter G. Raeth (ed.), Expert Systems: A Software Methodology for Modern Applications, Los Alamitos:IEEE Computer Society Press, 1990, pp 180-204.

• Computer Speech Processing, (ed. with Frank Fallside), Prentice-Hall International (UK) Ltd., 1985.

• "Optimal Search Strategies for Speech Understanding Control." Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 18, No. 3 (May, 1982 ). Reprinted in B. Webber and N. Nilsson (eds.), Readings in Artificial Intelligence, Tioga Publishing Co., Palo Alto, CA, 1981.

• "Cascaded ATN Grammars". American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Vol. 6, No. 1, January-March 1980.

• Semantics for a Question Answering System. New York: Garland Publishing, 1979. (Outstanding Dissertations in the Computer Sciences series.)

• "Semantics and Quantification in Natural Language Question Answering". In Advances in Computers, Vol. 17. New York: Academic Press 1978. Reprinted in Barbara Grosz, Karen Sparck Jones and Bonnie Webber (eds.), Readings in Natural Language Processing, Morgan Kaufmann, 1986.

• "Syntax, Semantics, and Speech". In D. R. Reddy (ed.), Speech Recognition, New York: Academic Press, 1975. (A concise introduction to syntax and semantics for Speech research.)

• "What's in a Link: Foundations for Semantic Networks". In D. Bobrow and A. Collins (eds.), Representation and Understanding: Studies in Cognitive Science, New York: Academic Press, 1975. Reprinted in R. Brachman and H. Levesque (eds.), Readings in Knowledge Representation, San Mateo: Morgan Kaufmann, 1985. Also reprinted in Allan Collins and Edward E. Smith (eds.), Readings in Cognitive Science, San Mateo: Morgan Kaufmann, 1988.

• "Transition Network Grammars for Natural Language Analysis," Comm. ACM, 13, No. 10, October, 1970. Reprinted in Yoh-Han Pao and George W. Ernest (eds.), Tutorial: Context-Directed Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence Techniques for Information Processing. IEEE Computer Society Press, Silver Spring, MD, 1982. Also reprinted in Barbara Grosz, Karen Sparck Jones and Bonnie Webber (eds.), Readings in Natural Language Processing, San Mateo: Morgan Kaufmann, 1986.

Mini-resume

• Previous Employers and Positions
  • On Technology, Inc., Principal Technologist
  • Harvard University, Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science
  • Applied Expert Systems, Inc., Principal Scientist
  • Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc., Senior Scientist, Department Manager, Principal Scientist
  • Harvard University, Assistant Professor
• Education
  • Ph.D. Applied Mathematics, Harvard University
  • A.M. Applied Mathematics, Harvard University
  • B.A. Mathematics and Physics, Ohio Wesleyan University

Copyright (c) 1999 W. A. Woods, All rights reserved.