Curriculum Vitae

Michael James O'Donnell

Personal Details

Date of Birth: 18-11-1960 Marital Status: Married
Nationality: Australian Residency: Spain
National Identity No.: X3126436-T
Address: Calle Aurora 3, 5a
28760, Tres Cantos, (MADRID),br> Spain.
Telephone: Home: 00-34-918-031-281
Work: 00-34-91-497-2273
Fax: 00-34-91-497-2235
Email: michael.odonnell@uam.es
Web: http://www.eps.uam.es/~modonnel/
http://www.wagsoft.com/

Education

Postgraduate Education Ph.D. (University of Sydney) 1988 - 1994
Topic: Computational Processing of Systemic Grammar
Supervisor: Dr. Christian Matthiessen
Awarded: May 1995.
 
Tertiary Education Bachelor of Economics (University of Sydney)
Awarded the Peat Marwick Mitchell Prize in Operations Research

Bachelor of Arts (University of Sydney) with First Class Honors

Relevant Work Experience

Dec 2004- Present Research Fellow University Autonoma de Madrid. Employed under government research funding (Contrato Ramon y Cajal)
June 2003-2005 Administrator, Wagsoft Systems.
Jan. 2001 - June 2003 Consultant, Language & Computing, Belgium. Contracted to lead the Computational Lingusitics group. Main tasks – development of a syntactic parser, conceptual understanding and document structurer recognition. Partially funded by Acamed project (Flemish Government Research Grant)
Sept. 2000 - Dec. 2000 Consultant, ITC-irst, Centro per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica, Trento, Italy. Employed to work on various language engineering projects, in particular, M-Piro, applying multilingual text generation to a museum hypertext interface.
Dec. 1995 - July 2000 Research Fellow, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh. Employed under the ILEX project (UK funded), to implement a Dynamic Hypertext interface to Museums, and the HIPS project a European Consortium, working on a similar system.
Oct-Dec 1994 Guest Researcher, Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung (GMD), Institut für Integrierte Publikations- und Informations-systeme (IPSI), Darmstadt (Germany). I produced a report surveying the available wide-coverage semantic analysing systems to perform knowledge capture for an Editor's Workbench.
May-Sept 1994 Consultant, Information Sciences Institute (USC), Los Angeles: Studied register variation in a body of newspaper texts, and to provide linguistic mechanisms to allow these patterns to be represented in a computational implementation. I implemented a tool to support semi-automated coding of the texts (O'Donnell 1995).
Sept. 1992-Jan. 1993 Senior Research Assistant, Dialogue Project, Speech Technology and Language Research Group, University of Sydney. In this Telecom Australia-funded project we built up a dialogue model for use in a natural language interface (Rowles et al. 1992a, 1992b, 1993a, 1993b). My dynamic formalism (O'Donnell 1990) served as the basis of this work.
Dec 1990-Sept 1992 Computational Linguist, Electronic Discourse Analyser (EDA) Project, Fujitsu Australia, Sydney. The goal of this project was to build a prototype for a "Discourse Checker" - a system along the lines of a grammar checker, but capable of locating coherency problems in multi-sentential text (Matthiessen et al. 1991). I implemented the parser component.
Nov 1989 - Dec 1990 Computational Linguist, Penman Project, Information Sciences Institute, Los Angeles. I was employed as a 'resident linguist', to manage changes to the Nigel grammar (a large computational generation grammar). I also ported the Penman system to Macintosh operating system, and worked with Robert Kasper in re-implementing his parser, switching from a unification-based implementation to LOOM-based implementation (LOOM being a knowledge representation language).
May 1985 - Nov 1989 (part time) Computer Assistant, Dr Bernard Lake, Bridge St, Sydney. This job consisted of statistically analysing medical records, and writing up reports of the results. I also coded an application to perform the statistical analyses.
1984 Casual Tutor, Department of Economic Statistics, University of Sydney.

Research Stays

Dec. 1997 - Jan. 1998 Visiting Fellowship, Dept. of Computer Science, Macquarie University.
June-July 1995 Guest Researcher, University of Waterloo (Canada). I provided extensions to the Penman Generation Grammar.
Feb 1993 Consultant, Telecom Research Lab (TRL), Melbourne Australia. Revised TRL's implementation of the model devised in the Dialogue Project (see above).
July 1990 - Aug 1990 Guest Researcher, Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung (GMD), Institut für Integrierte Publikations- und Informations-systeme (IPSI), Darmstadt (Germany). I was employed to convert an existing unification-based grammar into a form usable by the LOOM knowledge representation system.

Publications

Books

  • Rachel Whittaker, Michael O'Donnell and Anne McCabe (Eds.) 2007. Language & Literacy: Functional Approaches. Continuum: London.
  • Anne McCabe, Michael O'Donnell y Rachel Whittaker (Eds.) 2007. New Directions in Language and Education. Continuum: London.
  • O'Donnell, Michael 1994 Sentence Analysis and Generation -- a Systemic Perspective. Ph.D. Dissertation, Linguistics Dept., University of Sydney.

Journal Articles

  • Benson, James, William Greaves, Michael O'Donnell and Jared Taglialatela 2002 "Evidence for Symbolic Language Processing in a Bonobo (Pan paniscus)". Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 9, No. 12, December 2002.
  • O'Donnell, Michael, Chris Mellish, Jon Oberlander and Alistair Knott 2001 "ILEX: An architecture for a dynamic hypertext generation system". Natural Language Engineering 7, 225--250.
  • O'Donnell, Michael 2000 "Intermixing Multiple Discourse Strategies for Automatic Text Composition". Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses (RCEI), No. 40 (April): Special Issue on Intercultural and Textual Approaches to Systemic-Functional Linguistics.
  • Oberlander, J., M. O'Donnell, A. Knott and C. Mellish. 1998. "Conversation in the museum: experiments in dynamic hypermedia with the intelligent labelling explorer." New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 4, 11--32.
  • O'Donnell, Michael & Peter Sefton 1995 "Modelling Telephonic Interaction: A Dynamic Approach". In: Interface. Journal of Applied Linguistics 10.1 (1995) 63-78.
  • O'Donnell, Michael 1990 "A Dynamic Model of Exchange", Word, Volume 3, pp. 293-328.

Book Chapter

  • Marti, P., Zancanaro, M., O'Grady, M., O'Hare, G., Not, E., Bianchi, A., O'Donnell, M 2006. "Serving Visitor Communities: A Mediated Experience of the arts". In P. Purcell (ed), Networked Neighbourhoods : The Connected Community in Context Springer: New York.
  • O'Donnell, Mick & John Bateman 2005. "SFL in Computational Contexts". In Jonathan Webster, Ruqaiya Hasan & Christian Matthiessen (eds.) Continuing Discourse on Language: A Functional Perspective. Equinox: London. Pp. 343-382.
  • Benson, James, William Greaves, Michael O'Donnell and Jared Taglialatela. 2004 "The ideational dimension". Chapter 2 in James Benson & William Greaves (Eds.) Functional Dimensions of Ape-Human Discourse. Equinox.
  • Van Moll, Maarten & Mick O'Donnell 2004 "Automatic Recognition of Generic Structure: Medical Discharge Notices". In Text and Texture: Systemic Functional viewpoints on the nature and structure of text. L'Harmattan, Paris.
  • Knott, A., Oberlander, J., O'Donnell, M. and Mellish, C. 2001. "Beyond elaboration: The interaction of relations and focus in coherent text." T. Sanders, J. Schilperoord and W. Spooren (eds.) Text representation: linguistic and psycholinguistic aspect. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • O'Donnell, Michael 1999 "Context in Dynamic Modelling". In Mohsen Ghadessy (ed.) Text and Context in Functional Linguistics. Benjamins: Holland. Pp. 63-99.

Conference Proceedings

  • O'Donnell, Michael 1993 "Reducing Complexity in a Systemic Parser" in Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Parsing Technologies. Tilburg, the Netherlands, August 10-13.
  • O'Donnell, Michael 1995 "From Corpus to Codings: Semi-Automating the Acquisition of Linguistic Features". Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Empirical Methods in Discourse Interpretation and Generation, Stanford University, California, March 27 - 29.
  • O'Donnell, Michael 1995 "Sentence Generation Using the Systemic WorkBench". Proceedings of the Fifth European Workshop on
  • O'Donnell, Michael & Peter Sefton 1995 "Modelling Telephonic Interaction: A Dynamic Approach". In: Interface. Journal of Applied Linguistics 10.1 (1995) 63-78. Natural Language Generation, 20-22 May, Leiden, The Netherlands, pp. 235-238.
  • O'Donnell, Michael 1996 "Input Specification Fecha: 2005 in the WAG Sentence Generation System". Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Herstmonceux Castle, UK, 13-15 June 1996.
  • O'Donnell, Michael 1997 "Variable-Length On-Line Document Generation". Proceedings of the 6th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation. March 24 - 26, 1997 Gerhard-Mercator University, Duisburg, Germany.
  • O'Donnell, Michael & Peter Sefton 1995 "Modelling Telephonic Interaction: A Dynamic Approach". In: Interface. Journal of Applied Linguistics 10.1 (1995) 63-78.
  • O'Donnell, Michael 1997 "RST-Tool: An RST Analysis Tool". Proceedings of the 6th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation. March 24 - 26, 1997 Gerhard-Mercator University, Duisburg, Germany.
  • O'Donnell, Michael 1997 "Variable-Length On-Line Document Generation". Proceedings of the Flexible Hypertext Workshop of the Eighth ACM International Hypertext Conference, Southhampton, UK.
  • O'Donnell, Michael 2000 "RSTTool 2.4 -- A Markup Tool for Rhetorical Structure Theory". Proceedings of the International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG'2000), 13-16 June 2000, Mitzpe Ramon, Israel. 253 -- 256.
  • O'Donnell, Michael 2001 "Museum Audio Guides which Adapt to the User and Context", Meeting in Computational Linguistics, University of Seville, 2000.
  • O'Donnell, Michael 2001 "Editorials vs. front page news: Differences in realis and tense across newspaper genres". Proceedings of the 2nd International Contrastive Linguistics Conference, Compostela, Spain. 25-27 October 2001.
  • O'Donnell, Michael 2005. "The UAM Systemic Parser", Proceedings of the 1st Computational Systemic Functional Grammar Conference, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia. 16 July 2005. 47-55.
  • O'Donnell, Michael, Hua Cheng and Janet Hitzeman. 1998 "Integrating Referring and Informing in NP Planning". Proceedings of the Coling-ACL '98 Workshop on the Computational Treatment of Nominals, August 16, 1998, Universite de Montreal, Canada. pp. 46-55.
  • O'Donnell, Michael, Alisair Knott, Jon Oberlander and Chris Mellish 2000 "Optimising text quality in generation from relational databases". Proceedings of the International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG'2000), 13-16 June 2000, Mitzpe Ramon, Israel. 133 --140.
  • Cheng, Hua, Chris Mellish and Michael O'Donnell. 1997 "Aggregation Based on Text Structure for Descriptive Text Generation". In Proceedings of the PhD Workshop on Natural Language Generation, 9th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI97), Aix-en-Provence, France, 1997.
  • Cox, Richard, Mick O'Donnell and Jon Oberlander 1999 "Dynamic versus static hypermedia in museum education: an evaluation of ILEX, the intelligent labelling explorer". Proceedings of the Artificial Intelligence in Education conference (AI-ED99), Le Mans, July 1999. Amsterdam: IOS Press.
  • King R., Vonwiller J., Matthiessen C., O'Donnell M. & Sefton P. 1992 "Speech Modelling of Interactive Speech Response Systems in Telecommunications", in Proceedings of the Institute of Engineers Australia Communications Conference. Sydney 101-111.
  • Knott, Alistair, Chris Mellish, Jon Oberlander & Mick O'Donnell "Sources of Flexibility in Dynamic Hypertext Generation", in Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Herstmonceux Castle, UK, 13-15 June 1996.
  • Knott, Alistair, Michael O'Donnell, Jon Oberlander, Chris Mellish 1997 "Defeasible Rules in Content Selection and Text Structuring", Proceedings of the 6th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation March 24 - 26, 1997 Gerhard-Mercator University, Duisburg, Germany.
  • Matthiessen C., O'Donnell M, and Zeng L. 1991 "Discourse Analysis and the Need for Functionally Complex Grammars in Parsing" in Proceedings of the Second Japan-Australia Joint Symposium on Natural Language Processing, October 2-5, 1991, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Iizuka City, Japan.
  • Mellish, C., Knott, A., Oberlander, J. and O'Donnell, M. 1998. "Experiments using stochastic search for text planning." 9th International Workshop on Natural Language Generation. 5-7 August 1998. Prince of Wales Hotel, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada.
  • Mellish, C., O'Donnell, M., Oberlander, J. and Knott, A. 1998. "An architecture for opportunistic text generation". 9th International Workshop on Natural Language Generation. 5-7 August 1998. Prince of Wales Hotel, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada.
  • Murcia, Susana and Mick O'Donnell, 2001 "Semantic functions in instructional texts: a comparison between English and Spanish". Proceedings of the 2nd International Contrastive Linguistics Conference, Compostela, Spain. 25-27 October 2001.
  • Murcia, Susana and Mick O'Donnell, 2003 "Advice In Instructional Texts: A Comparison Between English And Spanish". Proceedings of the 3rd International Contrastive Linguistics Conference, Compostela, Spain. 21-25 September 2003.
  • Oberlander, J., C. Mellish, M. O'Donnell and A. Knott 1997. "Exploring a gallery with intelligent labels". Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums, pp153-161. Paris, September, 1997.
  • Rowles, C., X. Huang, M. de Beler, J. Vonwiller, R. King, C. Matthiessen, P. Sefton & M. O'Donnell, 1992. "Understanding Spoken English", First Australian Workshop on Natural Language Understanding and Information Retrieval, Melbourne, November, 1992.
  • Rowles, C., X. Huang, M. de Beler, J. Vonwiller, R. King, C. Matthiessen, P. Sefton & M. O'Donnell, 1992 "Using Prosody to Assist in the Understanding of Spoken English, Fourth Australian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, Brisbane, November- December, 1992.
  • Rowles C., X. Huang, M. de Beler, J. Vonwiller, R. King, C. Matthiessen, P. Sefton & M. O'Donnell 1993. "Understanding Spoken English Using a Systemic Functional Framework." First Pacific Association Conference on Computational Linguistics, Vancouver, Canada, April 1993.
  • Rowles C., M. de Beler, M. O'Donnell and P. Sefton 1993. "The Use of Context in the Understanding of Spoken English", the 6th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Melbourne, November, 1993.

Conference presentations (with no proceedings)

  • "Dynamic Modelling of Exchange", 17th International Systemic Congress, University of Sterling, Scotland, 4-7 July 1990
  • "Electronic Text Analysis with Systemic Grammar", Second Australian Systemic Linguistics Conference, University of Queensland, January, 1991.
  • "Grammatical Metaphor: Incongruence in the Mapping of Semantics and Grammar" Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society, University of Sydney, Australia, June 27-28, 1992
  • "Linking generic structure to exchange in a dynamic discourse model" (with Peter Sefton), 19th International Systemic-Functional Congress, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, July 13-18, 1992
  • "A Contemporary History of Systemic Parsers", 19th International Systemic-Functional Congress, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, July 13-18, 1992.
  • "Constructing Ideation through Interaction: Macro-Ideational Structure and Exchange Structure", 20th International Systemic-Functional Congress, University of Victoria, B.C., Canada, July 19- 23, 1993.
  • "A Parser for Systemic Grammars", 20th International Systemic-Functional Congress, University of Victoria, B.C., Canada, July 19- 23, 1993.
  • "Interstratal Mapping", 21st International Systemic-Functional Congress, University of Gent, Belgium, 1-5 August, 1994.
  • "Modelling dialogue for a computer telephone operator" (with Peter Sefton, Christian Matthiessen and Janine Schulz), Workshop on Spoken and Written Discourse in Institutional Contexts, University of Antwerp, Belgium, 8-11 August, 1994.
  • "Metaredundancy in Register Analysis -- A study of English Tense". 23rd International Systemic-Functional Congress, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, July 1996.
  • "Context in Dynamic Modelling" Plenary, 8th Euro-International Systemic Functional Workshop, Nottingham-Trent University, England, August 1996.
  • "Modelling Culture: Information Representation in a Museum Context". 24th International Systemic-Functional Congress, Glendon College, York University Toronto, Canada. July 21-25, 1997.
  • "Varying the Tenor of Discourse in Computer Generated Text: The Ilex System". 10th Euro-International Systemic Functional Workshop, Liverpool, England, July 1998.
  • "Composing a Text: a computer's view". 25th International Systemic Functional Congress, Cardiff University, Wales, 13-18th July, 1998.
  • "Automatic Recognition of Generic Structure: Medical Discharge Notices" (with Maarten van Moll), Euro-International Systemic Functional Workshop, Brest, France, July 2001
  • "What can computational linguistics do for the linguist? Three tools for teaching linguistics", 12th Euro-International Systemic Functional Workshop, Glasgow, Scotland, July 2000.
  • "Using coding tools to pinpoint ideological differences in discourse", 28th International Systemic Functional Congress, Carleton University, Otawa, Canada, 2001.
  • "Automating the Coding of Semantic patterns: applying machine learning to corpus linguistics", 29th International Systemic Functional Congress, University of Liverpool, UK, 2002.
  • "Automatic Register Classification of Documents Using Lexis: Some Experiments", Euro-International Systemic Workshop, University of Leeds, UK, 2003.
  • "The UAM Corpus Tool". 18th European Systemic Functional Workshop. University of Trieste, Gorizia, Italy, 2006.
  • "Reconciling functionalism and structuralism: a tristratal view on process types". 31st International Systemic Functional Congress, University of Sydney, Australia, 2005
  • (COLLOQUIUM LEADERS) Canzhong Wu, John Bateman, Mick O'Donnell, Christian Matthiessen. "Corpus linguistics: Representing systemic networks and analyses in XML". 31st International Systemic Functional Congress, University of Sydney, Australia, 2005.
  • (WORKSHOP) "Difficult Process-type Workshop", 17th Euro-International Systemic Workshop, University College London, UK, 2005.
  • "A survey of process type classification over difficult cases", 17th Euro-International Systemic Workshop, University College London, UK, 2005.
  • Gorizia
  • Odense 1
  • Odense 2
  • Saarbrucken
  • ICAME
  • Chocano, G., Jiménez, R., Lozano, C., Mendikoetxea, A., Murcia, S., O'Donnell,
    M., Rollinson, P., Teomiro, I. An exploration into word order in learner corpora: The WOSLAC project. Paper presented at Corpus Linguistics 2007, University of Birmingham.

Keynote Speaker

  • Keynote speaker at the 8th Euro-International Systemic Functional Workshop, Nottingham-Trent University, England, August 1996
  • Keynote speaker at the 12th Euro-International Systemic Functional Workshop, Glasgow University, July 2000.

Invited Lecturing

  • One Day Course in Parsing, Summer School before 21th International Systemic-Functional Congress, University of Leuven, July 25-29 1994.
  • Half-Day Course in Dynamic Modelling of Discourse, University of Nottingham, UK, February 1st, 1995.
  • Three Day Course on Using the WAG Generation System, Glendon College, York University, Toronto, June 14 - 16, 1995.
  • Lecturer, Summer School before the International Systemic-Functional Congress, Glendon College, York University Toronto, Canada. July 7-18, 1997.
  • Lecturer, Summer School of Systemic Functional Linguistics, Glendon College, York University Toronto, Canada. July 8-16, 1999.
  • Lecturer, Postgraduate Course, Jaen University, 2000.
  • Invited Lecture, University of Saltsburg, Austria, 2000.
  • Invited Lecture, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2001.
  • Invited Lecture, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2002.
  • Invited Lecture, School of Media, London College of Printing, March 2003.

Expert Reviewing

  • Expert Evaluator for FP6 5th Call Information Science Technology (Multimodal Systems), September 2005.
  • Expert Evaluator for FP6 2nd Call Information Science Technology (Cognitive Systems), November 2003.
  • Expert Evaluator for NTO Dutch Research Council, May 2005
  • Program Committee, 2007, ACL workshop on "Language Technology for Cultural Heritage Data", Prague, Czech Republic.
  • Program Committee, 2007, European Systemic Functional Linguistics Workshop, Saarbrucken, Germany.
  • Program Committee, 2006, International Systemic Functional Linguistics Congress, Brazil.
  • Program Committee, 2006, European Systemic Functional Linguistics Workshop, Gorizia, Italy.
  • Program Committee, 2005, 10th European Workshop On Natural Language Generation (ENLG).
  • Program Committee, 2005, 1st Computational Systemic Functional Grammar Conference.
  • Program Committee, 2004, International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG'04).
  • Review Comittee, 2003 Multilingual Corpora: Linguistic Requirements and Technical Perspectives. Pre-conference workshop at Corpus Linguistics 2003
  • Program Committee, 2002, International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG'02).
  • Reviewer, 1999 New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia on Adaptive Hypermedia. Special on Issue adaptivity and user modeling in hypertext/hypermedia systems.
  • Program Committee, International Systemic-Functional Congress, Cardiff University, Wales. 13-18th July , 1998.
  • Program Committee, International Systemic-Functional Congress, Glendon College, York University Toronto, Canada. July 7-18, 1997.
  • Reviewer, 1997 ACM Symposium for Applied Computing (WWW Applications track).
  • Reviewer, 1996 IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI).

Other Professional Activities

  • Co-Organiser, Euro-International Systemic Functional Workshop, Madrid, 2004.
  • Membership Secretary & Executive Member, International Systemic Functional Linguistics Association, 2002-
  • List manager, SYSFLING (the email discussion group for Systemic Linguistics), 1997- .
  • Web manager, International Systemic Functional Linguistics Association web site (http://www.isfla.org/), 2000-.
  • Web manager, Systemic Homepage (the main information site for Systemic Linguistics), (http://www.isfla.org/Systemics/), 1995- .

Software

  • UAM CorpusTool: A corpus annotation tool allowing annotation of multi-text corpora at multiple layers.
  • Systemic Coder: a tool for assigning features to segments of text for statistical analysis.
  • RSTTool: A tool for graphical anotation of rhetorical structure of text.
  • ILEX (with others): generates hypertext descriptions of museum objects on the fly.
  • WAG (Workbench for Analysis and Generation): A sentence generation tool, and knowledge representation engine.