People
Faculty Members
Robert P. Futrelle |
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Professor Futrelle's research focuses on discovering the knowledge content of scientific research literature so future electronic information systems can take advantage of full-document content. He has been building systems that analyze and determine the content of diagrams in documents. He has also pursued related work on natural-language understanding for documents.
Currently, Professor Futrelle is refining his Diagram Understanding System to extend current context-based constraint grammars to highly complex diagrams and additional diagram classes. He is creating metadata representations of diagram semantics as well as systems for intelligent authoring.
In his thirty-year career, Professor Futrelle has developed one of the first syntax-directed natural-language parsers; one of the first applications of linear programming to quantum-mechanical computations; the Galatea system for interactive analysis of moving images; the most extensive and detailed computer-based analysis of amoeboid cell locomotion of its time; and perhaps the first paper on automated diagram summarization.
As principal investigator for a major project started in 1989 and funded by the National Science Foundation, Professor Futrelle developed natural-language processing and diagram parsing to build knowledge-based systems that work with text and graphics in biological research papers. He also founded and heads Northeastern's Biological Knowledge Laboratory, and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Computational Biology.
Career Publication Highlights
Futrelle, Robert P., and Natalya Fridman. 1995. Principles and tools for authoring knowledge-rich documents. In Database and expert system applications '95 workshop on digital libraries, 357-362.
Futrelle, Robert P., and Nikos Nikolakis. 1995. Efficient analysis of complex diagrams using constraint-based parsing. In proceedings, International conference on document analysis and recognition.
Futrelle, Robert P., Xiaolan Zhang, and Yumiko Sekiya. 1995. Corpus linguistics for establishing the natural-language content of digital library documents. In Digital libraries current issues, ed. N. R. Adam, B. K. Bhargava, and Y. Yesha, 165-180. Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag