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Research Mission

  • Our group is dedicated to the computational exploration of language and its creative potential, from lexical phenomena such as Metaphor, Analogy, Metonymy, Polysemy, to complex social phenomena like Humour.  
  • As such, we build models of creative language use, and attempt to construct applications from these models. 
  • We are also striving to develop generalized models of creative linguistic behaviour. 
  • The resources that drive our research are the lexical ontologies WordNet and HowNet and the open-source encyclopaedia Wikipedia. 
  • Read or listen Tony Veale’s discussion of humour and metaphor on the radio show - PhilosophyTalk.  
  • The ZeitGeist system for harvesting creative neologisms from Wikipedia (using WordNet) has been reported in New Scientist magazine. You can read the on-line report here. You can also read a related article in Dutch from the web magazine Planet Internet here.

    • Publications

    • Forceville, Charles, Veale, Tony and Feyaerts, Kurt (2010).

      Forceville, Charles, Veale, Tony and Feyaerts, Kurt. (2010). Balloonics: The Visuals of Balloons in Comics. The RISE and REASON of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Form, Edited by Joyce Goggin & Dan Hassler-Forest. [pdf]

    • Cristina Butnariu, Su Nam Kim, Preslav Nakov, Diarmuid OSeaghdha, Stan Szpakowicz, Tony Veale (2010).

      Cristina Butnariu, Su Nam Kim, Preslav Nakov, Diarmuid OSeaghdha, Stan Szpakowicz, Tony Veale, "SemEval-2010 Task 9: The Interpretation of Noun Compounds Using Paraphrasing Verbs and Prepositions, ACL workshop on Semantic Evaluations (SemEval 2010)), 2010, pp. 39--44. [pdf]

    • Veale, T. and Hao, Y. (2010).

      Veale, T. and Hao, Y. (2010). Detecting Ironic Intent in Creative Comparisons. In the proceedings of ECAI’2010, the 19th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Lisbon, 2010. [pdf]

    • Li, G., Lopez-Fernandez, A. and Veale, T. (2010)

      Li, G., Lopez-Fernandez, A. and Veale, T. (2010). UCD-Goggle: A Hybrid System for Noun Compound Paraphrasing. In the proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, ACL 2010, pages 230–233, Uppsala, Sweden, 15-16 July 2010. [pdf]

    • Veale, T. (2007).

      Veale, T. (2007). Dynamic Creation of Analogically-Motivated Terms and Categories in Lexical Ontologies. In Judith Munat (Ed.), Lexical Creativity, Texts and Contexts (Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics), pp 189-212. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [pdf]

    • Veale, T. and Butnariu, C. (2010).
      Veale, T. and Butnariu, C. (2010). Harvesting and Understanding On-line Neologisms. Onysko, Alexander and Michel, Sascha (Eds.), Cognitive Perspectives on Word Formation. 393-416. Mouton De Gruyter. [pdf]

    • Veale, T. and El Mouddeb, M. (2010).
      Veale, T. and El Mouddeb, M. (2010). Similarity, Comparability And Analogy In WordNet: Squaring The Analogical Circle With Mondrian. Bhattacharyya, P., Vossen, P. and Fellbaum, C. (eds.) Proceedings of the 5th Global WordNet Conference, Mumbai, India. [pdf]

    • Cristina Butnariu, Su Nam Kim, Preslav Nakov, Diarmuid OSeaghdha, Stan Szpakowicz, Tony Veale (2009)
      Cristina Butnariu, Su Nam Kim, Preslav Nakov, Diarmuid OSeaghdha, Stan Szpakowicz, Tony Veale, "SemEval-2010 Task 9: The Interpretion of Noun Compounds Using Paraphrasing Verbs and Prepositions. In Proceedings of the NAACL Workshop on Semantic Evaluations: Recent Achievements and Future Directions (SEW-2009) at NAACL, 2009, pp. 100-105. [pdf]

    • Cardoso, A., Veale, T., Wiggins, G. (2009)
      Cardoso, A., Veale, T., Wiggins, G. (2009) ’Converging on the divergent: the history (and future) of the international joint workshops in computational creativity’ AI Magazine 30 (3) :15-22. [pdf]

    • Veale, T. , Li, Guofu (2009)
      Veale, T., Li, Guofu. (2009). ONTOLOGICAL CLIQUES - Analogy as an Organizing Principle in Ontology Construction. In Proceedings of IC3K/KEOD, The International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. Madeira, Portugal. [pdf]

    • Veale, T.  (2009)
      Veale, T. (2009). Hiding in Plain Sight: Figure-Ground Reversals in Humour. In Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains and Gaps, G. Brône and J. Vandaele (eds.), Mouton de Gruyter. [pdf]

    • Veale, T. and Hao, Y. (2009)
      Veale, T. and Hao, Y. (2009).  Support Structures for Linguistic Creativity: A Computational Analysis of Creative Irony in Similes.  In proceedings of CogSci 2009, the 31st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Amsterdam. [pdf]

    Group Members

    Principal Investigators

    Current Post-graduates

    • Scorain Yu, WordNet-based games development, KNOW-BEST project
    • Cristina Butnariu, WordNet-based games development, KNOW-BEST project
    • Yanfen Hao, WordNet-based games development, KNOW-BEST project
    • Stephen Howell, WordNet-based games development, KNOW-BEST project
    • ShanShan Chen, Bilingual Ontology, KNOW-BEST project
    • Hyesook Kim, Construction of Korean WordNet / HowNet

    Past or concluding Post-graduates

    • Jer Hayes, Term Creation in Lexical Ontologies
    • Nuno Seco, Similarity Measures in Lexical Ontologies

    Related Research Groups and International Collaborators