Director, Institute of Linguistics
Dr Albert Gatt currently holds a lectureship in Linguistics and is also the Director of the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Malta. He is additionally Research Associate at the Tilburg centre for Communication and Cognition (Tilburg University, the Netherlands).
His main areas of research are computational linguistics, experimental psycholinguistics, and semantics. A lot of his work focuses on computational and psychological processes underlying language production and he is engaged in research in Natural Language Generation, a field in which techniques from Computer Science, theoretical linguistics, and psycholinguistics are brought together in the design and implementation of systems to automatically generate Natural Language text from non-linguistic data.
He is the author of a number of papers on formal semantics (especially possessive constructions in Maltese), and on Natural Language Generation.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Albert_Gatt
Research interest: Computational linguistics, Natural language generation, Experimental psycholinguistics, Formal semantics
Current projects and initiatives
- MAMCO: Multimodal Analysis of Maltese COrpora
- MLRS: The Maltese Language Resource Server
- REFNET: Linking Research on Reference An interdisciplinary research network on reference and related problems.
- PARSEME (PARSing and Multi-word Expressions): Towards linguistic precision and computational efficiency in natural language processing. An EU COST Initiative.
past projects
- Bridging the gap between psycholinguistics and computational linguistics: The case of referring expressions(Visiting Reearch Fellow; Tilburg Centre for Communication and Cognition)
- BabyTalk: Generating textual summaries of clinical temporal data (Research Fellow; Aberdeen)
- TUNA: Towards a UNified Algorithm for the Generation of Referring Expressions (PhD Student; Aberdeen)
Selected Publications:
- Gatt, A., Krahmer, E., van Deemter, K. and van Gompel, R.P.G. (2015). Reference production as search: The impact of domain size on the production of distinguishing descriptions Cognitive Science, in press
- Gatt, A., Marín, N., Portet, F. and Sánchez, D. (2016). The role of graduality for referring expression generation in visual scenes. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems (IPMU’16)
- Gatt, A. and Portet, F. (2015). Multilingual Generation of Uncertain Temporal Expressions from Data: A Study of a Possibilistic Formalism and its Consistency with Human Subjective Evaluations. Fuzzy Sets and Systems, 285: 73-93
- Tomaselli, M.V. and Gatt, A. (2015), Italian tag questions and their conversational functions. Journal of Pragmatics, 84, pp. 54-82
- Galea, L., Hermes, A., Gatt, A. and Grice, M. (2015), Cues to gemination in word-initial position in Maltese. In:Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPHS’15).
- Azzopardi, S., Pace, G., and Gatt, A. (2015), An intelligent contract editor. In: Proceedings of the 2015 Workshop in ICT (WICT’15)
http://staff.um.edu.mt/albert.gatt/publications-byyear.html