By 2005, I was conducting experiments with human readers for the purpose of trying to mimic the intelligence that they used when reading. Through my experiments, I was developing and testing the linguistic framework for enabling a machine to understand the discourse of the text that it read, By the Summer, I had developed some …
One of the crucial features of the intelligent reading machine for the blind and sight-impaired that I was proposing was the ability to read text for me (not just to me) and tell me what the text was about. I was confronted with the hard question of how to teach a machine how to understand …
I began working on my Ph.D. in computer science at Cambridge in 2003. The Cambridge Ph.D. is a research-only course and so I was through with taking classes. My task for the first year was to read as much background literature as I could in the area of computational linguistics and also to state a …
During the first two years of my work on my Ph.D. at Cambridge, I continued to work on Cynthia (my own speech synthesizer). I had just finished a productive year in theoretical linguistics where I specialized in acoustic phonetics and speech synthesis, and I had a lot of momentum for adding new features to Cynthia …
When I went to the LSA Summer Institute of Linguistics in June of 2001, I had a growing interest in speech synthesis. Upon returning to UGA that Fall, where I was enrolled as a Ph.D. student in computer science, I was sure that I wanted to concentrate my graduate research on the topic. My major …
During my first year as a graduate student in computer science at UGA, I experimented with different software and hardware for reading text. While using various products, I made notes of their limitations and how far they were from solving my reading problems. Over the Summer of 2000, I wrote an outline of features for …
This post may be a bit more technical than my first post but I wanted to describe the foundations of some of the computational problems that I needed to solve in order for a machine to be able to read natural language (i.e., human language). I hope to return to more general topics in the next …
I am sight-impaired. I cannot read standard print without heavy magnification. This has always made reading and studying difficult. I was born with optic nerve damage, and so glasses cannot offer any correction beyond some magnification. Because of the optic nerve damage, even magnified text is blurry. As a result, I cannot read an entire …
