Robert Dale
Robert Dale researches natural language generation and practical language technology. Dale’s doctoral work concerned choosing object descriptions, with later extensions for relations and events. With Ehud Reiter, he coauthored the 1995 paper on referring expressions and conversational implications. Dale held a Macquarie professorship through August 2012 and later worked as a consultant; he also wrote the Industry Watch column. ACL elected him a fellow in 2018.
- Works
- 331
- Citations
- 8,885
- h-index
- 41
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
-
Doctoral research
Choosing a distinguishing description
Dale developed an algorithm during his PhD to select the semantic content of a distinguishing description. It reasons over object properties in a context so that a listener can identify the intended referent. The algorithm was published in 1992.
-
1995
Descriptions and conversational meaning
With Ehud Reiter, Dale studied how generated noun phrases can identify an object while avoiding false conversational implications. Their paper compares computational approaches and specifies an algorithm and the resources a host system needs to use it.
-
Through 2012
From university work to applications
Dale was a professor in Macquarie’s Department of Computing through August 2012. He then consulted on the selection and deployment of natural-language technologies. He also wrote the Industry Watch column about commercial language technology.
-
2018
Language-generation recognition
ACL elected Dale a fellow in 2018. The fellowship recognizes Dale’s research on generating referring expressions and natural language generation more broadly.
Sources and credits
Photo: web.science.mq.edu.au; Robert Dale's Home Page; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: web.science.mq.edu.au. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.