Professor Yorick Wilks

• Senior Research Fellow, January 2007 -
• Visiting Professor, October 2006 - January 2007
• Research Associate, March - October 2006
• Visitor, October 2005 - February 2006
• Visiting Fellow, September 2003 - February 2004

Yorick Wilks is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sheffield. He received his MA and PhD (1968) from Pembroke College, Cambridge. He has also taught or researched at Stanford, Edinburgh, Geneva, Essex and New Mexico State Universities. His interests are artificial intelligence and the computer processing of language, knowledge and belief, especially as applied to the future of the Internet: the Semantic Web and the possibility of Companion-like interfaces.

His recent books include: Natural language Processing and the Semantic Web (with Christopher Brewster, Now Books, 2009), Machine Translation - how far can it go (Springer, 2009), Artificial Believers (Erlbaum 1991), Electric Words (MIT, 1996) and Machine Conversations (Kluwer, 2001), and a new edited volume in 2009 from John Benjamins is: 'Artificial Companions in Society: scientific, economic, psychological and philosophical perspectives'. He is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Policy Studies.

See the initial Companions demonstrators.

Research interests

artificial companions, semantic web, artificial intelligence, computer processing of language, knowledge and belief

Contact information

Professor Yorick Wilks, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 1 St Giles Oxford OX1 3JS, United Kingdom. Telephone: +44 (0)1865 287210 Fax: +44 (0)1865 287211 Email: enquiries@oii.ox.ac.uk

Publications

• Catizone, R., Worgan, S., Wilks, Y., Dingli, A and Cheng, W. (2009) A World-Hybrid approach to a conversational Companion for reminiscing about images. In: Y.Wilks (ed.) Artificial Companions in Society: scientific, economic, psychological and philosophical perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Dingli, A., Wilks, Y., Catizone, R. and Cheng, W. (2009) The Companions: Hybrid-World Approach. KRPD09 Workshop, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Pasadena, CA.
• Field, D., Catizone, R., Cheng, W., Dingli, A., Worgan, S., Ye, L. and Wilks, Y. (2009) The Senior Companion: a Semantic Web Dialogue System. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2009), Demonstration Track, Budapest, Hungary, 10-15 May 2009.
• Peltu, M. and Wilks, Y. (2009) Close Engagements with Artificial Companions: Key Social, Psychological, Ethical and Design issues. In: Y.Wilks (ed.) Artificial Companions in Society: scientific, economic, psychological and philosophical perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Wilks, Y. (2009) Artificial Companions as dialogue agents. Proceedings of SIGDIAL Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2009), Queen Mary University of London, 11-12 September 2009.
• Wilks, Y. (2009) Artificial Companions. In: Y.Wilks (ed.) Artificial Companions in Society: scientific, economic, psychological and philosophical perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Wilks, Y. (2009) On being a Victorian Companion. In: Y.Wilks (ed.) Artificial Companions in Society: scientific, economic, psychological and philosophical perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Wilks, Y. (ed.) (2009) Artificial Companions in Society: scientific, economic, psychological and philosophical perspectives. John Benjamins: Amsterdam.
• Wilks, Y. and Brewster, C. (2009) Natural Language Processing as a Foundation of the Semantic Web. London: Now Press.
• Wilks, Y. and Pustejovsky, J. (eds) (in press) Readings in the Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Catizone, R., Dingli, A., Pinto, H. and Wilks, Y. (2008) Information Extraction tools and methods for Understanding Dialogue in a Companion. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC08), Marrakech, Morocco.
• Catizone, R., Worgan, S., Wilks, Y., Dingli, A. and Cheng, W. (2008) A Multimodal Conversational Companion for Reminiscing about Images. Fourth International Workshop on Human-Computer Conversation, Bellagio, Italy.
• Field, D., Worgan, S., Webb, N., Hepple, M. and Wilks, Y. (2008) Automatic Induction of Dialogue Structure from the Companions Dialogue Corpus. Fourth International Workshop on Human-Computer Conversation, Bellagio, Italy.
• Guthrie, D., Guthrie, L. and Wilks, Y. (2008) An Unsupervised Approach for the Detection of Outliers in Corpora. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC08), Marrakech, Morocco.
• Pinto, H., Wilks, Y., Catizone, R. and Dingli, A. (2008) The Senior Companion Multiagent Dialogue System. In: Proceedings of the Seventh International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 08).
• Turunen, M., Hakulinen, J., Kainulainen, A., Catizone, R., Pinto, H., Gorrell, G., Wilks, Y., Stahl, O., Tabutiaux, B., Rodriguez Gancedo, M.C., Cavazza, M., Danieli, M. and Pele, D. (2008) An Initial Prototype COMPANION. Deliverable D1.1.3 for the EC 6FP IST Companions Project (IST-34434).
• Webb, N., Liu, T., Hepple, M. and Wilks, Y. (2008) Cross Domain Dialogue Act Tagging. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC08), Marrakech, Morocco.
• Wilks, Y. (2008) Machine Translation: its scope and limits. New York, NY: Springer.
• Wilks, Y. (2008) On Whose Shoulders? [ACL Lifetime Achievement Award] Computational Linguistics 34 (4) 471-486.
• Wilks, Y. (2008) The Semantic Web and the Apotheosis of annotation: but what are its semantics? IEEE Intelligent Systems 23 (3) 41-49.
• Wilks, Y. (2008) What is the Semantic Web and what will it do for eScience? In: R.Kumar Jain (ed.) Semantic Web: Concepts and Applications. ICfai Press, Hyderabad.
• Wilks, Y. (2008) What would a Wittgensteinian Computational Linguistics be like? Proceedings of AISB'08, Workshop on Computers and Philosophy, Aberdeen.
• Wilks, Y. and Peltu, M. (2008) Close Engagements with Artificial Companions: Key Social, Psychological, Ethical and Design Issues. Oxford Internet Institute Forum Discussion Paper No. 14, University of Oxford.
• Wilks, Y., Benyon, D., Brewster, C., Ircing, P. and Mival, O. (2008) Dialogue, Speech and Images: The Companions Project Data Set. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC08), Marrakech, Morocco.
• Wilks, Y., Catizone, R. and Mival, O. (2008) The Companions paradigm as a method of eliciting and organising life data. Proceedings of Workshop on Memories for Life, British Computer Society, London, 18 March 2008.
• Ahmad, K., Brewster, C. and Stevenson, M. (eds) (2007) Words and Intelligence I. Selected papers by Yorick Wilks. Dordrecht: Springer.
• Boye, J., Catizone, R., Gorrell, G., Pinto, H., Wilks, Y. and Wiren, M. (2007) Base Dialogue model structure based on state-of-the-art. Deliverable D3.1.1 for the EC 6FP IST Companions Project (IST-34434).
• Huang, F. and Wilks, Y. (2007) Clustered sub-matrix singular value decomposition. NAACL/HLT 2007.
• Wilks, W. (2007) Is There Progress on Talking Sensibly to Machines? Science 318: 927-928.
• Wilks, Y. (2007) Is there progress on talking sensibly to computers? Science 318: 927-928.
• Catizone, R., Dalli, A. and Wilks, Y. (2006) A Methodology for Evaluating Timelines. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language, Resources and Evaluation (LREC'06), Genoa, Italy, 22-28 May 2006.
• Dalli, A. and Wilks, Y. (2006) A System for Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Online News and Blogs. HLT-NAACL 2006, New York, 5-7 June 2006.
• Dalli, A. and Wilks, Y. (2006) Automatic Dating of Documents and Temporal Text Classification. Proceedings of COLING/ACL'06, Sydney, Australia.
• Dalli, A., Catizone, R. and Wilks, Y. (2006) A Sheffield Multiple-Document Summarisation System for MES 2006. MES'06 Workshop, COLING/ACL, Sydney, Australia.
• Guthrie, D., Allison, B., Liu, W., Guthrie, L. and Wilks, Y. (2006) A Closer Look at Skip-gram Modelling. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language, Resources and Evaluation (LREC'06), Genoa, Italy, 22-28 May 2006, pp. 1222-1225.
• Iria, J., Brewster, C., Ciravegna, F. and Wilks, Y. (2006) An Incremental Tri-partite Approach to Ontology Learning. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language, Resources and Evaluation (LREC'06), Genoa, Italy, 22-28 May 2006.
• Wilks, Y. (2006) Artificial Companions as a new kind of interface to the future Internet. Oxford Internet Institute Research Report No. 13, University of Oxford.
• Wilks, Y. (2006) Getting Meaning into the Machine. Proceedings of IEEE Intelligent Systems: Special Issue on 50th Anniversary of Dartmouth Conference.
• Wilks, Y. (2006) What is the Semantic Web and what will it do for eScience? Oxford Internet Institute Research Report No. 12, University of Oxford.
• Wilks, Y. (ed.) (2006) Language, cohesion and form: selected papers of Margaret Masterman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Webb, N., Hardy, H., Ursu, M., Strzalkowski, T. and Wilks, Y. (2005) Data-Driven Language Understanding for Spoken Language Dialogue. Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Spoken Language Understanding, Pittsburgh, PA.
• Webb, N., Hepple, M. and Wilks, Y. (2005) Dialogue Act Classification using Intra-Utterance Features. Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Spoken Language Understanding, Pittsburgh, PA.
• Webb, N., Hepple, M. and Wilks, Y. (2005) Empirical determination of thresholds for optimal dialogue act classification. Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial), Nancy, France.
• Webb, N., Hepple, M. and Wilks, Y. (2005) Error Analysis of Dialogue Act Classification. Text, Speech and Dialogue: Proceedings of 8th International Conference, Carlsbad, Czech Republic, 12-15 September 2005, pp. 451-458.
• Wilks, Y. (2005) Artificial companions. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 30 (2) 145-152.
• Wilks, Y. (2005) What would a Wittgensteinian Linguistics be like? Proceedings of the International Conference on Pragmatics, Lake Garda.
• Dalli, A., Xia, Y. and Wilks, Y. (2004) Adaptive Information Management: FASiL Email Summariser. Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING'04), Geneva, Switzerland.
• Pastra, E. and Wilks, Y. (2004) Vision-Language Integration in AI: a reality check. Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI'04), Valencia, Spain, pp. 937-941.
• Saggion, H., Cunningham, H., Bontcheva, K., Maynard, D., Hamza, O. and Wilks, Y. (2004) Multimedia Indexing through Multisource and Multilingual Information Extraction; the MUMIS project. Data and Knowledge Engineering 48 (2) 247-264.
• Wilks, Y. (2004) Are ontologies distinctive enough for computations over knowledge? IEEE Intelligent Systems, Trends and Controversies.
• Wilks, Y. (2004) IR and AI: Traditions of representation and non-representation in Information Processing. In: S.McDonald and J.Tait (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2004, LNCS 2997, pp. 12–26.
• Wilks, Y. (2004) On the Ownership of Text. Computers and the Humanities 38 (2) 115-127.
• Pastra, K., Saggion, H. and Wilks, Y. (2003) Extracting relational facts for indexing and retrieval of crime-scene photographs. Knowledge-Based Systems 16 (5-6) 313-320.
• Pastra, K., Saggion, H. and Wilks, Y. (2003) Intelligent Indexing of Crime-Scene Photographs. IEEE Intelligent Systems [Special Issue on Advances in Natural Language Processing] 18 (1) 55-61.
• Peters, W. and Wilks, Y. (2003) Data-driven Detection of Figurative Language Use in Electronic Language Resources. Metaphor and Symbol 18 (3) 161-173.
• Wilks, Y., Nirenburg, S., Somers, H. (eds) (2003) Readings in Machine Translation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Maynard, D., Tablan, V., Cunningham, H., Ursu, C., Saggion, H., Bontcheva, K. and Wilks, Y. (2002) Architectural Elements of Language Engineering Robustness. Natural Language Engineering 8 (2/3) 257-274.
• Wilks, Y. and Catizone, R. (2002) What is Lexical Tuning? Journal of Semantics 19 (2) 167-190.
• Ballim, A., Wilks, Y., By, T. and Liske, C. (2001) Modelling agent attitudes in legal reasoning. Computers and Informatics 20 (6).
• Nirenburg, S. and Wilks, Y. (2001) What's in a symbol: ontology, representation and language. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 13 (1) 9-23.
• Stevenson, M. and Wilks, Y. (2001) The Interaction of Knowledge Sources in Word Sense Disambiguation. Computational Linguistics 27 (3) 321-349.
• Wilks, Y. (2000) Is Word Sense Disambiguation Just One More NLP Task? Computers and the Humanities 34 (1-2) 235-243.

Projects

• Companions: Intelligent, Persistent, Personalised Multimodal Interfaces to the Internet

  November 2006 - October 2010

  Companions is developing a virtual conversational 'Companion': an agent that stays with the user for long periods of time, develops a relationship and 'knows' its owner's preferences and wishes, communicating primarily by using and understanding speech.

• Networks for Web Science

  October 2007 - April 2009

  Establishing networks of researchers from different technical and social science research disciplines to begin to develop a Web Science research agenda through the exchange of PhD students and collaborative workshops.

• The Learning Companion: an embodied conversational agent for learning

  August 2008 -

  The Learning Companion project aims to evaluate the feasibility of a computer-based digital tool to help adults whose engagement with learning is tentative or hard to sustain make productive use of the Internet for achieving their own learning projects.

Events

• Lovelace lecture 2010: What Will A Companionable Computational Agent Be Like?

  Wednesday 7 July 2010 18:30 - 21:00

Webcasts

• The Companions Project: Introduction

  Recorded on: 16 November 2006 Duration: 00:32:34

  The Companion is a persistent conversational agent that appears to learn a person's tastes and habits, and carries out activities within their digital space on the Internet, such as organising image and text records as a coherent life narrative.

News

• Professor Yorick Wilks appointed Senior Research Fellow of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII)

  15 February 2007 Oxford Internet Institute

  Professor Yorick Wilks joins the OII as a Senior Research Fellow. His research interests include artificial intelligence and the computer processing of language, knowledge and belief.

Last updated on: 3 February 2010