Emilia Branny Home institution Jagiellonian University, Cracow Country Poland MULTILINGUA Fellowship March-December 2005 Project Electronic Text Technology in Information Society: From Hypertext to Computational Linguistics

The project involves research on electronic text technology, and is an important part of my Ph.D. studies. In my doctoral thesis I plan to investigate the following issues: · What is electronic text and how is it usually described? · How has the development of electronic technology changed the idea of text? · What are the models to describe a text (literary theory, statistics, text generation algorithms or paradigms), what are their strengths and weaknesses? · How can authorship be defined in this context? · How can the difference between texts be effectively measured? · How far is automatic text generation possible? · What are the limits of automatic text summarizing?

At Bergen I am planning to do practical research related to my Ph.D. Aksis Institute hosts vast knowledge and unique library resources in the area of electronic text technology, which are invaluable to my research.

The goals I am going to achieve here within the Multilingua project are:

1. implementing an advanced version of Polish Text Summarizer

2. doing translations of representative texts concerning hypertext theory

3. participation in editorial work on Ted Nelson’s “Computer Lib/Dream Machines” in cooperation with the editors - Jill Walker and Noah Wardrip-Fruin

4. writing a series of articles and reports to be included in my Ph.D. thesis, among them: · a literature review, largely based on knowledge gathered during translations and editorial work · a report on automatic text processing, largely based on the experience with text summarizing · a chapter on authorship and measuring difference between texts