Personalised Content Delivery for Assisted Navigation of Information Rich, Physical Environments such as a Museum. The research will yield improved international standing through scientific advances disseminated through high impact refereed publications and open source software. The collaborations within the project will make Melbourne a hub for research in user modeling and language technology. This will attract post-graduate students in these areas, and potentially commercialisation interest. ....Personalised Content Delivery for Assisted Navigation of Information Rich, Physical Environments such as a Museum. The research will yield improved international standing through scientific advances disseminated through high impact refereed publications and open source software. The collaborations within the project will make Melbourne a hub for research in user modeling and language technology. This will attract post-graduate students in these areas, and potentially commercialisation interest. The demonstration prototypes will provide proof of concept of eventual applications that improve the capabilities of the environments in which we live. These applications, which can be investigated by follow-up projects, will in turn encourage collaborations with Australian companies seeking to build innovative software applications.Read moreRead less
Supporting adaptive, interactive documents. The project will improve comprehensibility of technical material, reduce paper usage, encourage collaborative science, improve the reliability of published science (by allowing post-publication annotation and correction), and improve the accessibility of technical material for readers who are blind or have poor vision. The project also holds considerable potential for supporting Australian companies in the publishing and document processing industries.
Natural Language Generation for Aboriginal Languages. Australian Aboriginal languages have a number of interesting characteristics that make them a challenge for language technology applications; as yet, there are none, unlike for the indigenous Inuit peoples of Canada and Maori of New Zealand. We will carry out a large-scale computational linguistic investigation of an Aboriginal language to create a data-to-text natural language generation system. The system will use data from Australian Rul ....Natural Language Generation for Aboriginal Languages. Australian Aboriginal languages have a number of interesting characteristics that make them a challenge for language technology applications; as yet, there are none, unlike for the indigenous Inuit peoples of Canada and Maori of New Zealand. We will carry out a large-scale computational linguistic investigation of an Aboriginal language to create a data-to-text natural language generation system. The system will use data from Australian Rules Football to automatically construct articles based on the data. This study of computational linguistics will have further national benefits through engagement of the owners of the language in the language survey, as well as generating articles that will encourage literacy and language maintenance.Read moreRead less
Ask the Net: Intelligent Natural Language Learning. Natural Language Processing (NLP) has progressed rapidly using corpus-based machine learning techniques. However, corpus development costs cause a ?data bottleneck? which prevents systems from reaching human competence. This project overcomes the difficulties of creating huge corpora by employing the innate language ability of untrained contributors. We will show how to automatically select and present examples, containing informative lingui ....Ask the Net: Intelligent Natural Language Learning. Natural Language Processing (NLP) has progressed rapidly using corpus-based machine learning techniques. However, corpus development costs cause a ?data bottleneck? which prevents systems from reaching human competence. This project overcomes the difficulties of creating huge corpora by employing the innate language ability of untrained contributors. We will show how to automatically select and present examples, containing informative linguistic structures, which are most beneficial for training NLP systems. These examples will be analysed by many contributors whose responses will be automatically collated into corpora. Huge corpora are vital to emerging language technologies for managing textual information in the global economy.
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A Layered Controlled Natural Language for Knowledge Representation. In this research project we will develop a controlled natural language for knowledge representation that has the potential to bridge the gap between fragments of natural language and formal languages. This controlled language will be based on a variety of increasing sophisticated layers, each building upon those below it by providing enhancements in expressive power. Sentences of the controlled language will be unambiguously tra ....A Layered Controlled Natural Language for Knowledge Representation. In this research project we will develop a controlled natural language for knowledge representation that has the potential to bridge the gap between fragments of natural language and formal languages. This controlled language will be based on a variety of increasing sophisticated layers, each building upon those below it by providing enhancements in expressive power. Sentences of the controlled language will be unambiguously translatable into a corresponding formal language. Anyone who can read and write English can immediately use the controlled language with the help an intelligent text editor. This technology will make it possible for non-specialists to write problem specifications in terms of the application domain without the need to formally encode the information.Read moreRead less
Effective Information Retrieval for Partitioned Document Collections. Current information retrieval services make use of massive indexes in order to resolve content-based queries. Monolithic approaches like this have been effective until now because the volume of data stored has been manageable on a single machine or tightly-coupled cluster of machines, and because the data has been available for collection. But with an increasing amount of automatically generated data, and an increasing diversi ....Effective Information Retrieval for Partitioned Document Collections. Current information retrieval services make use of massive indexes in order to resolve content-based queries. Monolithic approaches like this have been effective until now because the volume of data stored has been manageable on a single machine or tightly-coupled cluster of machines, and because the data has been available for collection. But with an increasing amount of automatically generated data, and an increasing diversity of information sources, other approaches are required. In this project we will investigate mechanisms for handling retrieval tasks when the indexes to the data are stored locally with the data, and when no central index is viable.Read moreRead less
Incremental Knowledge Acquisition for Machine Translation from Multiple Experts. With increasing globalisation and an increasing amount of electronically available documents the need for machine translation is growing dramatically. The state-of-the-art in machine translation is still far from satisfactory. Substantial post-editing is necessary for most non-technical texts and even for many technical documents to make the translation really understandable. This project will develop a new approach ....Incremental Knowledge Acquisition for Machine Translation from Multiple Experts. With increasing globalisation and an increasing amount of electronically available documents the need for machine translation is growing dramatically. The state-of-the-art in machine translation is still far from satisfactory. Substantial post-editing is necessary for most non-technical texts and even for many technical documents to make the translation really understandable. This project will develop a new approach for buildingmachine translation systems by extending the unorthodox approach of Ripple-Down Rules, which proved very successful for building expert systems in the medical domain.It is intended to build a machine translation system by integrating the knowledge from many experts.Read moreRead less
A scalable and portable question-answering system. The current availability of large volumes of free text digitally stored demands the development of methodologies that can automatically find specific answers to user questions about this "unstructured" information. The goal of this project is to develop a scalable portable and domain-independent real-time natural-language question-answering system that explores the logical contents of the text. To achieve this we will fuse current approaches to ....A scalable and portable question-answering system. The current availability of large volumes of free text digitally stored demands the development of methodologies that can automatically find specific answers to user questions about this "unstructured" information. The goal of this project is to develop a scalable portable and domain-independent real-time natural-language question-answering system that explores the logical contents of the text. To achieve this we will fuse current approaches to question answering with approaches that look at the logical contents of the questions and answer candidates. A central part of the project will be the characterisation of the optimal logical forms, the determination of efficient methods to create and store sentence logical forms of potentially large volumes of text, and the treatment of difficult questions by incorporating summarisation and text generation techniques.Read moreRead less
An knowledge-based approach to multi-document text summarisation for automated meta-analysis of the scientific literature. The biomedical sciences produce literature at an exponential rate, and the size of this knowledge base far exceeds the capacity of humans to keep up with the growth in new knowledge. This project will develop computational text summarisation methods to abstract the content of scientific journal articles reporting clinical trials, and develop multi-document summarisation meth ....An knowledge-based approach to multi-document text summarisation for automated meta-analysis of the scientific literature. The biomedical sciences produce literature at an exponential rate, and the size of this knowledge base far exceeds the capacity of humans to keep up with the growth in new knowledge. This project will develop computational text summarisation methods to abstract the content of scientific journal articles reporting clinical trials, and develop multi-document summarisation methods to synthesise these abstracts using automated statistical meta-analysis methods. These methods have broad potential to improve text-summarisation technologies in general, to profoundly enhance our ability to integrate published knowledge, and to make a highly significant and specific contribution to improving the quality of evidence used in health decision-making. Read moreRead less
Query interpretation and response generation in large on-line resources. The unprecedented information explosion associated with the evolution of the Internet makes salient the challenge of providing users with answers to queries posed to Internet resources. The proposed project will apply machine learning and reasoning under uncertainty techniques to leverage the large amount of data found in the Internet in order to perform three tasks: (1) infer users' informational goals from their questions ....Query interpretation and response generation in large on-line resources. The unprecedented information explosion associated with the evolution of the Internet makes salient the challenge of providing users with answers to queries posed to Internet resources. The proposed project will apply machine learning and reasoning under uncertainty techniques to leverage the large amount of data found in the Internet in order to perform three tasks: (1) infer users' informational goals from their questions, (2) modify questions to improve the accuracy of retrieval engines, and (3) compose concise replies from the retrieved documents. The envisioned outcome of this project is a system that will generate replies to questions posed to on-line resources.Read moreRead less