About Me

I am a software developer and researcher. I have been an NSERC postgraduate scholar, and hold a PhD in Computing from the School of Computing at Queen's University.

Research

My past research was focused in two areas:

  • My PhD research focused on the semantics of natural languages, with the overall goal of enriching the amount of detail that occurs in a computer generated story.
  • My MSc research combined a Natural Language Generation system with a Speech Systhesis system to produce speech that sounded more human.

Interests

I am currently interested in the following topics:

  • The enrichment of semantic content generated for storytelling.
  • Semantic representations suitable for Natural Language Processing.
  • Machine Learning in NLP.
  • Improvements to Speech Synthesis technologies.
  • Computer emulation.
  • Machine Learning applications in Computer Vision.

Research Groups

I have been involved with the following research groups at Queen's University:

  • The Computational Linguistics Laboratory, School of Computing.
  • The Cree Database Project, Language and Linguistics.
  • The Morpho-Syntactic Research Group, Language and Linguistics.

Publications

  • Levison, M., Lessard, G., Thomas, C., Donald, M. (2012). The Semantic Representation of Natural Language. Bloomsbury Studies in Theoretical Linguistics. Bloomsbury Publishing.
  • Thomas, C. (2010). The Algorithmic Expansion of Stories. PhD Thesis, School of Computing, Queen's University. October 2010.
  • Thomas, C. (2009). An Exploration of Semantic Formalisms - Part II: A Brief Survey of Other Semantic Formalisms. Technical Report No. 555, School of Computing, Queen's University. [ PDF ]
  • Thomas, C. (2009). An Exploration of Semantic Formalisms - Part I: A Comparison of First Order Predicate Calculus, Intensional Logic and Conceptual Structures. Technical Report No. 554, School of Computing, Queen's University. [ PDF ]
  • Thomas, C. (2008). Towards a User-Friendly Semantic Formalism for Natural Language Generation. The ACM Crossroads Student Magazine, 15:2, pp. 17-23. [ HTML ]
  • Lessard, G., Levison, M., Thomas, C. (2007). The Contribution of Natural Language Generation and Corpus Data to the Study of Derivational Productivity. In ATALA Workshop on Morphological Productivity. Paris, France. November 10, 2007.
  • Lessard, G., Levison, M., Thomas, C. (2007). Using Lexical Transformations to Expand Machine-Readable Lexicons. In Proceedings of the Workshop of the GLDV Working Group on Lexicography at the Biennial Spring Conference of the GLDV, pages 75-81. April 2007.
  • Thomas, C., Levison, M., Lessard, G. (2004). Experiments in Prosody for the Generation of Oral French. In Proceedings of InSTIL/ICALL2004 - NLP and Speech Technologies in Advanced Language Learning Systems, pages 123-126. Venice, Italy. June 17-19, 2004. [ PDF ]
  • Thomas, C. (2003). Automatic Generation of French Speech. The ACM Crossroads Student Magazine, 9:3, pp. 24-27. [ HTML ]
  • Levison, M., Thomas, C. (2002). Jigsaw Puzzles: Problem B. In: Proceedings of ALLC-ACH, pages 62-64. Tuebingen, Germany. July 2002. [ HTML ]
  • Thomas, C. (2002). A Prosodic Transcription Mechanism for Natural Language Generation. MSc Thesis, School of Computing, Queen's University. October 2002.