Robert E. Mercer
Robert E. Mercer
Ph.D. The University of British Columbia, 1987
Professor Emeritus, UWO
Adjunct Research Professor, UWO
Adjunct Professor, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo
Faculty Affiliate, Vector Institute
Director, Cognitive Engineering Laboratory, UWO
Natural Language Processing, Argumentation Mining, Knowledge Representation, Logics for Reasoning, Natural Language Understanding
His research interests have included developing various knowledge representation
frameworks and schemes and their associated reasoning mechanisms, and applying
these processes together with machine learning to natural language, computer
vision, animation, human-computer interaction, and information retrieval and
information extraction.
His current research focus is argumentation in scholarly biomedical texts.
Scientists and clinicians use argumentation to convince readers of their
journal papers that the claims made in those papers should become part of
the knowledge about biomedicine. Mercer and his lab are providing methods
to have computers find these arguments in the natural language text of
journal articles. Outcomes of this research will include indexing of
scientific claims and evidence in the research literature, thus providing
a method to navigate the scientific literature that adds a new dimension
to the presently available keyword searching techniques.
The University of Western Ontario
Computer Science Department
Cognitive Engineering Laboratory
London,
Ontario, Canada N6A 5B7
(519) 661 2111 x86893 voice
(519) 661 3515 fax
Email: mercer@csd.uwo.ca