Papers, Publications, and Major Talks

This page contains links to talks, papers and other articles I've written over the years.

See also Google scholar profile which is often more up-to-date!

Invited Talks

A sample of invited scientific talks. Other invited talks have been at QuantumTech and Q2B, Grab Technologies (in Singapore, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur), the University of Washington, Microsoft Research, and Elsevier.

Journal Papers

AI / NLP and Quantum Computing Biomedical papers
Discovering discovery patterns with predication-based Semantic Indexing. Trevor Cohen, Dominic Widdows, Roger W. Schvaneveldt, Peter Davies, Thomas C. Rindflesch. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 26 July 2012

Reflective Random Indexing and Indirect Inference: A Scalable Method for the Discovery of Implicit Connections. Cohen T, Schvaneveldt, R. Widdows D. Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2010. Apr; 43(2): 240-256
Empirical Distributional Semantics: Methods and Biomedical Applications. Trevor Cohen, Dominic Widdows, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, April 2009, 42(2), pages 390-405.
Papers on language, ontologies, and information extraction (with collaborators in North Africa).
Exploring Semantic Relatedness in Arabic Corpora using Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Models. Adil Toumouh, Dominic Widdows, Ahmed Lehireche. I.J. Information Engineering and Electronic Business, Vol 1, pp. 37-47, 2016.

Lightweight domain ontology learning from texts: graph theory-based approach using Wikipedia. Khalida Bensidi Ahmed, Adil Toumouh, Dominic Widdows. International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies archive Volume 9 Issue 2, pages 83-90. April 2014.

Parallel corpora and WordSpace models: using a third language as an interlingua to enrich multilingual resources. Adil Toumouh, Dominic Widdows, Ahmed Lehireche. International Journal of Information and Communication Technology (IJICT), 3(4): 299-313 (2011)
Differential geometry papers (I was properly trained in something once upon a time, honest!)
A Dolbeault-type Double Complex on Quaternionic Manifolds. Dominic Widdows. Asian Journal of Mathematics, Vol 6, No 2, pp. 253-276, June 2002. (.ps)

Quaternionic Algebra described by Sp(1) representations. Dominic Widdows. Quarterly Journal of Mathematics, Oxford, 2003. (.ps)

Conference Papers, Tech Reports, etc.

Transportation and Geo papers

Excited to still be writing for new fields, with work particularly focussing on Southeast Asia.
Spatial Entity Resolution between Restaurant Locations and Transportation Destinations in Southeast Asia. Emily Gao, Dominic Widdows (Grab Technologies). Presented at 6th International Conference on Geospatial Information Systems Theory, Applications, and Management (GISTAM), May 7-9, 2020.

GrabShare: The Construction of a Realtime Ridesharing Service. Dominic Widdows, Jacob Lucas, Muchen Tang, Weilun Wu (Grab Technologies). Presented at International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Engineering (ICITE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Sep. 1-3, 2017.

Semantic Vectors, Quantum Informatics, Learning and Reasoning

My main public research activities in the past few years have been in the area of Quantum Informatics and Semantic Vectors. I've stopped trying to categorize papers in this area as being about mathematical models, software, or empirical experiments, because these have all been coming together into one encompassing project. Much of this work has been inspired and carried out with Trevor Cohen.
Should Semantic Vector Composition be Explicit? Can it be Linear?. Dominic Widdows, Kristen Howell, Trevor Cohen. SemSpace 2021.
Graded Vector Representations of Immunoglobulins Produced in Response to West Nile Virus. Trevor Cohen, Dominic Widdows, Jason A. Vander Heiden, Namita T. Gupta, and Steven H. Kleinstein Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Quantum Interaction, San Francisco, California, 2016

Embedding Probabilities in Predication Space with Hermitian Holographic Reduced Representations. Trevor Cohen, Dominic Widdows. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Quantum Interaction, Filzbach, Switzerland, 2015

Graded Semantic Vectors: An Approach to Representing Graded Quantities in Generalized Quantum Models. Dominic Widdows, Trevor Cohen. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Quantum Interaction, Filzbach, Switzerland, 2015

Ideologies and their Points of View. Kirsty Kitto, Dominic Widdows. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Quantum Interaction, Filzbach, Switzerland, 2015

Real-Orthogonal Projections as Quantum Pseudo-Logic. Marjan Matvejchuk, Dominic Widdows Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Quantum Interaction, Filzbach, Switzerland, 2015
Predicting High-Throughput Screening Results With Scalable Literature-Based Discovery Methods. T Cohen, D Widdows, C Stephan, R Zinner, J Kim, T Rindflesch, P Davies. CPT Pharmacometrics Syst. Pharmacol. 3, e140, 2014.

Expansion-by-Analogy: A Vector Symbolic Approach to Semantic Search. Trevor Cohen, Dominic Widdows, Thomas Rindflesch. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Quantum Interaction, Filzbach, Switzerland, 2014

Purposeful Choice and Point-of-View: A Generalized Quantum Approach. Dominic Widdows. Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Quantum Interaction, Leicester, UK, 2013

Orthogonality and Orthography: Introducing Measured Distance into Semantic Space. Trevor Cohen, Dominic Widdows, Manuel Wahle. Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Quantum Interaction, Leicester, UK, 2013

Real, Complex, and Binary Semantic Vectors. Dominic Widdows, Trevor Cohen, Lance De Vine. Proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on Quantum Interaction, Paris, France, 2012

Many paths lead to discovery: analogical retrieval of cancer therapies. Cohen, T. Widdows, D. De Vine, L. Schvaneveldt, RW. Rindflesch, T. Proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on Quantum Interaction, Paris, France, 2012

Deterministic Binary Vectors for Efficient Automated Indexing of MEDLINE/PubMed Abstracts. Wahle M, Widdows D, Herskovic JR, Bernstam EV, Cohen T. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2012;2012:940-9. Epub 2012 Nov 3.

Finding Schizophrenia's Prozac: Emergent Relational Similarity in Predication Space. Cohen, T. Widdows, D. Schvaneveldt, RW. Rindflesch, T. Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Quantum Interaction, Aberdeen, UK, 2011.

Logical Leaps and Quantum Connectives: Forging Paths through Predication Space. Cohen, T. Widdows, D. Schvaneveldt, R. Rindflesch, T. AAAI Fall 2010 symposium on Quantum Informatics for cognitive, social and semantic processes (QI-2010).

Semantic Vector Products: Some Initial Investigations. Dominic Widdows. Second AAAI Symposium on Quantum Interaction, Oxford, 26th – 28th March 2008.
In this paper, Trevor Cohen and I applied some semantic vector techniques to analyzing authorship and people and places mentioned in the Bible. It was a lot of fun, and hopefully highlights one way that literary scholars, physicists, and computer scientists might interact.
Semantic Vector Combinations and the Synoptic Gospels. Dominic Widdows, Trevor Cohen, Third International Symposium on Quantum Interaction, Saarbruecken, March 2009, pages 215-265.
The following papers describe the SemanticVectors package in some detail. The most up-to-date documentation is as ever on the pacakge home page.
The Semantic Vectors Package: New Algorithms and Public Tools for Distributional Semantics. Dominic Widdows, Trevor Cohen, Fourth IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (IEEE ICSC2010).

Semantic Vectors: A Scalable Open Source Package and Online Technology Management Application. Dominic Widdows and Kathleen Ferraro. Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008).
In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that some of the mathematical structures responsible for the supposed "weirdness" of quantum mechanics aren't weird at all. Quantum mechanics is often much more in line with common sense than the predictions of classical physics. Peter Bruza and I finally felt confident enough about this to submit a paper on the subject, trying to encourage people to think about the goals and opportunities of an Open World Science approach.
Quantum Information Dynamics and Open World Science. Dominic Widdows and Peter Bruza. AAAI Spring Symposium on Quantum Interaction, Stanford, California, March 2007.
There is also a chapter in the Handbook of Quantum Logic and Quantum Structures that describes more of the cognitive and logical motivations for using "quantum" models to describe intelligent behaviour.
A Quantum Logic of Down Below. P.D. Bruza, D. Widdows, John Woods. Appears in K. Engesser, D. Gabbay and D. Lehmann (eds) Handbook of Quantum Logic, Quantum Structure and Quantum Computation. Elsevier, 2009. pages 625-660.
There is much preparatory ground for this work in Geometry and Meaning, and in some of the Information Retrieval papers below. An increasing number of key researchers have helped us considerably so far, including John Woods and Keith van Rijsbergen.

Information Extraction

Some of the first work I did at Google.
Scalable Attribute-Value Extraction from Semi-Structured Text. Yuk Wah Wong, Dominic Widdows, Tom Lokovic, Kamal Nigam, ICDM Workshop on Large-scale Data Mining: Theory and Applications, 2009.

Biomedical Informatics

A survey article.
Empirical Distributional Semantics: Methods and Biomedical Applications Trevor Cohen, Dominic Widdows, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, April 2009, 42(2), pages 390-405.
The following two papers are a pair of related works, describing recent progress that my collaborators in Algeria and Germany and I have been making in ontology learning and adaptation for the medical domain. The first paper describes some detailed experiments on ontology adaptation using purely noun coocurrences, led by Mr Toumouh. The second paper is more general, and describes some other linguistic constructions used for clustering and ontology adaptation, and describes a broad strategy for combining text-mining solutions with hand-coded language resources, motivated by work in word sense disambiguation and language acquisition over the past 15 years.
A. Toumouh, A. Lehireche, D. Widdows, M. Malki Adapting WordNet to the Medical Domain using Lexicosyntactic Patterns in the Ohsumed Corpus. Appeared in 4th ACS/IEEE International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA-06) March 8-11, 2006, Dubai/Sharjah, UAE.

Dominic Widdows, Adil Toumouh, Beate Dorow, Ahmed Lehireche Ongoing Developments in Automatically Adapting Lexical Resources to the Biomedical Domain. Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006). Genoa, Italy, May 24-26, 2006.

The following paper is an older work, carried out as part of the MUCHMORE project.

Dominic Widdows, Stanley Peters, Scott Cederberg, Chiu-Ki Chan, Diana Steffen and Paul Buitelaar. Unsupervised Monolingual and Bilingual Word-Sense Disambiguation of Medical Documents using UMLS. Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine ACL 2003 Workshop, ACL workshop, Sapporo, Japan, July 11, 2003, pages 9-16. (.ps)

Quaternionic algebra and geometry

These are very technical ...
Dominic Widdows. A Dolbeault-type Double Complex on Quaternionic Manifolds. Asian Journal of Mathematics, Vol 6, No 2, pp. 253-276, June 2002. (.ps)

Dominic Widdows. Quaternionic Algebra described by Sp(1) representations. Quarterly Journal of Mathematics, Oxford, 2003. (.ps)

Dominic Widdows. Quaternionic Algebraic Geometry. D.Phil thesis, University of Oxford, 2000. (.ps)

Geometric Logic and Inductive Reasoning

Dominic Widdows, Michael Higgins. Geometric ordering of concepts, logical disjunction, and learning by induction. Compositional Connectionism in Cognitive Science, AAAI Fall Symposium Series, Washington, DC, October 22-24, 2004. (.ps)

Information Retrieval

Dominic Widdows. Orthogonal Negation in Vector Spaces for Modelling Word-Meanings and Document Retrieval. 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Sapporo, Japan, July 7-12, 2003, pages 136-143. (.ps)

The following paper fills a (surprising) gap in the vector space model for information retrieval using quantum logic:

Dominic Widdows and Stanley Peters. Word Vectors and Quantum Logic: Experiments with negation and disjunction. Eighth Mathematics of Language Conference, Bloomington, Indiana, June 20-22, 2003, pages 141-154. (.ps)

Automatic Concept Learning using Vectors

Adil Toumouh, Dominic Widdows, Ahmed Lehireche: Parallel corpora and WordSpace models: using a third language as an interlingua to enrich multilingual resources. International Journal of Information and Communication Technology (IJICT), Volume 3(4): 299-313 (2011)

Dominic Widdows, Beate Dorow, and Chiu-Ki Chan. Using Parallel Corpora to enrich Multilingual Lexical Resources. Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Las Palmas, May 2002, pages 240-245. (.ps)

Dominic Widdows. Unsupervised methods for developing taxonomies by combining syntactic and statistical information. In Proceedings of HLT/NAACL 2003, Edmonton, Canada, June 2003, pages 276-283. (.ps)

Scott Cederberg and Dominic Widdows. Using LSA and Noun Coordination Information to Improve the Precision and Recall of Automatic Hyponymy Extraction. In Seventh Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2003), Edmonton, Canada, June 2003, pages 111-118. (.ps)

Baldwin, Timothy, Colin Bannard, Takaaki Tanaka and Dominic Widdows An Empirical Model of Multiword Expression Decomposability, Proceedings of the ACL-2003 Workshop on Multiword Expressions: Analysis, Acquisition and Treatment, Sapporo, Japan, July 2003, pages 89-96.

Automatic Concept Learning using Graph Theory

Dominic Widdows and Beate Dorow. A Graph Model for Unsupervised Lexical Acquisition. 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Taipei, August 2002, pages 1093-1099. (.ps)

Beate Dorow and Dominic Widdows, Discovering Corpus-Specific Word Senses. EACL 2003, Budapest, Hungary. Conference Companion (research notes and demos) pages 79-82. (.ps)

Beate Dorow, Dominic Widdows, Katerina Ling, Jean-Pierre Eckmann, Danilo Sergi and Elisha Moses. Using Curvature and Markov Clustering in Graphs for Lexical Acquisition and Word Sense Discrimination. MEANING-2005, 2nd Workshop organized by the MEANING Project, February 3rd-4th 2005, Trento, Italy. (.ps)

Dominic Widdows and Beate Dorow. Automatic Extraction of Idioms using Graph Analysis and Asymmetric Lexicosyntactic Patterns. ACL2005 Workshop on Deep Lexical Acquisition Ann Arbor, Michigan, June 30th, 2005

Information visualisation

Dominic Widdows, Scott Cederberg and Beate Dorow. Visualisation Techniques for Analysing Meaning. Fifth International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, Brno, Czech Republic, September 2002, pages 107-115. (.ps)

Dominic Widdows and Scott Cederberg, Monolingual and Bilingual Concept Visualization from Corpora. Demonstration presented at HLT/NAACL 2003, Edmonton, Canada, June 2003. (.ps)

Meaning in Context (including applications to Medical Informatics)

Dominic Widdows. A Mathematical Model for Context and Word-Meaning. Fourth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context, Stanford, California, June 23-25, 2003, pages 369-382. (.ps)

Dominic Widdows, Stanley Peters, Scott Cederberg, Chiu-Ki Chan, Diana Steffen and Paul Buitelaar. Unsupervised Monolingual and Bilingual Word-Sense Disambiguation of Medical Documents using UMLS. Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine ACL 2003 Workshop, ACL workshop, Sapporo, Japan, July 11, 2003, pages 9-16. (.ps)

Distributed Databases, Peer to Peer and Information Commons Research

The main ongoing research I worked on at MAYA was in the area of peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases, collectively many of the research goals being towards the idea of creating and maintaining an Information Commons.

Foundational Papers

Distributed Knowledge Representation using Universal Identity and Replication. Peter Lucas, Jeff Senn and Dominic Widdows. MAYA Design Inc. Technical Report MAYA-05007.

Roles in the Universal Database: Data and Metadata in a Distributed Semantic Network. Peter Lucas, Dominic Widdows, Joe Hughes and William Lucas. MAYA Design Inc. Technical Report MAYA-05009.

Peer-to-Peer Technology and Research Supporting the Information Commons

Shepherdable Indexes and Persistent Search Services for Mobile Users. Michael Higgins, Dominic Widdows, Magesh Balasubramanya, Peter Lucas, David Holstius. 8th International Symposium on Distributed Objects and Applications (DOA). Montpellier, France, Oct 30 - Nov 1, 2006
Managing Distributed Collaboration in a Peer-to-Peer Network. Michael Higgins, Stuart Roth, Jeff Senn, Peter Lucas, Dominic Widdows. 14th International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS 2006). Montpellier, France, Nov. 2006.
The Civium World Model: Spatial and Semantic Issues in Pervasive Computing. Dominic Widdows, Peter Lucas, David Holstius, Michael Higgins. Tech Report MAYA-07013.

Practical Information Systems using the Information Commons

The Universal Genetics Database: Information Sharing in Genetics and Beyond. Dr D. Widdows and Prof M. Barmada. Byline article for BioTech International, Vol. 18 No. 3, pp. 11-13, Reed Elsevier, June 2006.

The following paper, a collaboration between the Brookings Institution, 3 Rivers Connect, and MAYA Design, describes some of the ways in which the Information Commons is being used as a public information space, combining geographic and socioeconomic data and building interfaces that practioners in a range of fields can use to access and understand information in ways the were previously impossible.

The National Infrastructure for Community Statistics: Liberating Public GIS and Statistical Data. Pari Sabety (The Brookings Institution), Chris Sweeney (3 Rivers Connect), Dominic Widdows, Joshua Knauer, Maryl Curran Widdows and Peter Lucas (MAYA Design). Proceedings of the 4th Annual Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) Conference, Cleveland, Ohio. August, 2005.

Peter Lucas, Magesh Balasubramanya, Dominic Widdows and Michael Higgins. The Information Commons Gazetteer: A Public Resource of Populated Places and Worldwide Administrative Divisions. Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006), Genoa, Italy, May 24-26, 2006

The following paper is a much more complete version of the oral presentation given at the AAACL conference in Ann Arbor in 2005. As well as describing how peer-to-peer technology will benefit corpus linguistics and empirical science in general, the paper describes the Information Commons Publication Model, which uses recognized publisher indexes to provide quality assurance.

Magesh Balasubramanya, Michael Higgins, Peter Lucas, Jeff Senn and Dominic Widdows. Collaborative Annotation that Lasts Forever: Using Peer-to-Peer Technology for Disseminating Corpora and Language Resources. Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006). Genoa, Italy, May 24-26, 2006.
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