Studying 'research' in Australia’s library and information profession. With over 111 million annual visits, libraries are fundamental to Australia's social fabric and increasingly to its success as a national economy. In the current volatile economic climate Australia's libraries are being called upon to do more with less. This project aims to help Australia's libraries to contribute in a more powerful way to national productivity by helping library and information professionals make tough decis ....Studying 'research' in Australia’s library and information profession. With over 111 million annual visits, libraries are fundamental to Australia's social fabric and increasingly to its success as a national economy. In the current volatile economic climate Australia's libraries are being called upon to do more with less. This project aims to help Australia's libraries to contribute in a more powerful way to national productivity by helping library and information professionals make tough decisions in an environment where there is competition for limited resources. This project aims, for the first time, build an evidence base on research in Australia's library and information profession. It will establish a framework that can be used by library and information professionals to build a research culture that enables the adoption of "practitioner-researcher" as an approach to professional practice.Read moreRead less
Methodologies for Designing and Evaluating Information Retrieval Experiments. Australian researchers have been highly successful in the area of information searching for more than two decades. This project will reinforce that position. By developing better measures of how retrieval systems such as web search engines perform, we will be able to advise the providers of such services on how to structure software so as to maximize the utility gained by their customers. Targeted access to the right ....Methodologies for Designing and Evaluating Information Retrieval Experiments. Australian researchers have been highly successful in the area of information searching for more than two decades. This project will reinforce that position. By developing better measures of how retrieval systems such as web search engines perform, we will be able to advise the providers of such services on how to structure software so as to maximize the utility gained by their customers. Targeted access to the right information is a goal of all organizations, regardless of their type, and improved methodologies for conducting information retrieval experiments will have widespread and tangible benefits. The techniques developed will also be applicable in fields such as document categorization, text summarization, and machine learning.Read moreRead less
Static and Dynamic Query Pruning Techniques for Complex Text Retrieval Systems. Targeted access to the right information is a goal of all organizations, regardless of their type, and improved methodologies for implementing information retrieval systems have widespread and tangible benefits. Australian researchers have been highly successful in this area of information searching for more than two decades, and this project will reinforce that position. By developing techniques for providing fast ....Static and Dynamic Query Pruning Techniques for Complex Text Retrieval Systems. Targeted access to the right information is a goal of all organizations, regardless of their type, and improved methodologies for implementing information retrieval systems have widespread and tangible benefits. Australian researchers have been highly successful in this area of information searching for more than two decades, and this project will reinforce that position. By developing techniques for providing faster search, even in the presence of complex query variants and distributed implementations, we will be able to advise the suppliers of such services on how to provide a maximally useful product.
Read moreRead less
Special Research Initiatives - Grant ID: SR0567353
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$98,035.00
Summary
An Intelligent Search Infrastructure for Language Resources on the Web
. Language occupies a central role on the web: most content is expressed in language, and most access takes place via natural language search. Today, investigation of human language depends on access to this vast store of language data. This project will develop new infrastructure for accessing language resources, namely a language-aware search engine. Language technologies will be employed to classify web content, and a ....An Intelligent Search Infrastructure for Language Resources on the Web
. Language occupies a central role on the web: most content is expressed in language, and most access takes place via natural language search. Today, investigation of human language depends on access to this vast store of language data. This project will develop new infrastructure for accessing language resources, namely a language-aware search engine. Language technologies will be employed to classify web content, and a special search keyword 'lang:' will constrain search results to be in the specified language. The system will be integrated with major language archives in Australia and overseas, and deployed on the high performance computing infrastructure at Melbourne University's Advanced Research Computing Centre.
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
Real-time rights-based recordkeeping governance. This interdisciplinary research project aims to explore how records co-creation can be conceptualised in child protection and information law and overseen dynamically through a new digitally enabled, child-centred and rights-based advocacy and regulatory framework, to play an integral role in ensuring that the systems to protect children from abuse and neglect do not themselves cause harm. This project seeks to develop participatory information go ....Real-time rights-based recordkeeping governance. This interdisciplinary research project aims to explore how records co-creation can be conceptualised in child protection and information law and overseen dynamically through a new digitally enabled, child-centred and rights-based advocacy and regulatory framework, to play an integral role in ensuring that the systems to protect children from abuse and neglect do not themselves cause harm. This project seeks to develop participatory information governance as a new theoretical foundation for proactive recordkeeping and rights advocacy for childhood out-of-home Care. Improved transparency, accountability, efficiency and access to justice are anticipated benefits from this legal, recordkeeping and information infrastructure design research.Read moreRead less
Accurate Context-Aware Search for Managed Document Collections. Search is a key component of a vast range of computing applications. However, while search on large collections of general-purpose text is well-understood, and the best systems are highly effective, search on smaller or special-purpose collections is much less reliable and has attracted relatively little research. By identifying general ways of using context such as user history or prior page usefulness, the quality of search in s ....Accurate Context-Aware Search for Managed Document Collections. Search is a key component of a vast range of computing applications. However, while search on large collections of general-purpose text is well-understood, and the best systems are highly effective, search on smaller or special-purpose collections is much less reliable and has attracted relatively little research. By identifying general ways of using context such as user history or prior page usefulness, the quality of search in such cases can be greatly improved. Products that make use of these principles will provide greater workplace efficiency and be able to locate information that other search tools cannot identify.Read moreRead less
Improving Interactions for Digital Browsing of Large Collections. Browsing for information is an established and fundamental part of how people find the knowledge that they need. However, our current understanding of how browsing succeeds or fails is poor. This is because we have limited empirical data, and until recently, the available technologies to create detailed data on what people actually look at and when were very limited. As a result, digital browsing methods have been almost universal ....Improving Interactions for Digital Browsing of Large Collections. Browsing for information is an established and fundamental part of how people find the knowledge that they need. However, our current understanding of how browsing succeeds or fails is poor. This is because we have limited empirical data, and until recently, the available technologies to create detailed data on what people actually look at and when were very limited. As a result, digital browsing methods have been almost universally inferior to real-world counterparts. Given the lack of fundamental theories to inform design, this is unsurprising. After creating a detailed and systematic account of user behaviour in browsing, we will create novel designs that will accelerate the discovery of information, particularly for innovative work.Read moreRead less
Finding answers for complex questions. This project aims to develop a new search paradigm for on-line search engines that presents users with answers to complex questions, rather than forcing them to find answers themselves from lists of retrieved documents. The project will develop a taxonomy of complex answer search tasks, devise novel techniques to increase the effectiveness of complex answer retrieval through interaction and, create a new evaluation framework for precise measurement of syste ....Finding answers for complex questions. This project aims to develop a new search paradigm for on-line search engines that presents users with answers to complex questions, rather than forcing them to find answers themselves from lists of retrieved documents. The project will develop a taxonomy of complex answer search tasks, devise novel techniques to increase the effectiveness of complex answer retrieval through interaction and, create a new evaluation framework for precise measurement of system effectiveness. This project should provide significant advances that will benefit all users of search engines.Read moreRead less
Connecting the Disconnected: Designing Socially Inclusive, Integrated, Archival and Recordkeeping Systems and Services. Archives and records are the memory banks of healthy organisations, governments, communities and societies. This project aims to address systemic failings of current systems to meet identity, memory and accountability needs of individuals and communities in crisis. It will pioneer a new participatory methodology for archival design to deliver sustainable, dynamic, and integrate ....Connecting the Disconnected: Designing Socially Inclusive, Integrated, Archival and Recordkeeping Systems and Services. Archives and records are the memory banks of healthy organisations, governments, communities and societies. This project aims to address systemic failings of current systems to meet identity, memory and accountability needs of individuals and communities in crisis. It will pioneer a new participatory methodology for archival design to deliver sustainable, dynamic, and integrated archival and recordkeeping systems. It will be developed through the co-design of an integrated archival access network for reconstructing identity and a life story archive system for children currently in care. This project aims to transform evidence and memory management into information infrastructure that better protects and respects human rights.Read moreRead less