Research Interests

Jeroen's main research interests are on the boundary between linguistics and modelling of information systems. He sees information systems less as databases and more as communication systems between people. This explains his emphasis on natural language (especially in the development stage of an information system) and the crossover with groupware systems and CSCW.

Ph.D. thesis

The Ph.D. thesis Jeroen is working on (due March 1996) will present a way in which a Lexicon of common and specialised words and concepts can be of use during the development of information and communication systems. The same Lexicon may prove very valuable for organisation management as well, since it contains business process information that is needed in most management actions.

This Lexicon will be the major means of communication between the future users of the information system, who know very well what they are doing but often cannot properly formalise their own world, and the system analysts who know how to formalise worlds but have no experience in the specific world the information system has to operate in.

To meet this goal, the Lexicon has to be formal, but also friendly and expressive enough to be accepted by the domain specialists (No Maths!). This calls for an innovative approach to the representation problem, using less formal semantics and more common-sense knowledge, and especially a lot of natural language. However, we don't want to drown in the swamp of automated interpretation of NL clauses.

Projects

Jeroen participates in the nation-wide project LICS (Linguistic Information and Communication Systems), a project within the LIKE (Linguistic Instruments in Knowledge Engineering) framework. He is a member of the VOIS research organisation.

Publications

Available Papers and Reports


My Home Page

This page is always under construction.

Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers