Allan Third



A picture of me

Who am I?

I'm a Ph.D. student in the Artificial Intelligence group in the Computer Science department of Manchester University, researching the logical complexity of controlled fragments of natural language. My supervisor is Dr Ian Pratt-Hartmann.

I can be contacted at:
Room 2.70
Department of Computer Science
Kilburn Building
Oxford Road
Manchester
M13 9PL
UK

or by email at:
allan.third (Just add on cs.man.ac.uk to get my full address. I already get huge amounts of spam, but hopefully obscuring my address like this will at least stop it from getting worse.)

Research

As alluded to above, I'm working in the area of truth-conditional semantics of natural languages. In particular, I'm looking at the computational complexity of automated reasoning with first-order translations of tightly restricted fragments of English, with a view to characterising the "semantic contributions" of various English grammatical constructs.

Less theoretically, and slightly more pointlessly, I'm also writing a resolution-based theorem prover in Java. The idea is to use the Java Comparator interface to allow a plugin-style architecture for term and literal orderings. Also, having a homegrown theorem prover should make it easier to allow natural language parsers to specify the exact proof strategy to use for a particular set of sentences, which should therefore allow us to show off some of our results. There ought to be a link to the source code here, but quite frankly, it's not yet in a releasable state, so you'll have to wait, I'm afraid.

Teaching

I'm involved as a lab demonstrator, either right now, or usually, on the following courses:

What else?

Don MacInnes and I have started (Nov 2003) writing our own cryptic crosswords, with staggeringly efficient grid-filling software written by Robin Houston. We're really only just learning, and I don't think either of us are yet making any claims to quality. Nonetheless, the curious can find my efforts here, and the productions of Caveman here.

Page last modified 11th of December, 2003.