Fairness in Natural Language Processing. Natural language processing (NLP) has achieved spectacular commercial successes in recent years, and has been deployed across an ever-increasing breadth of devices and application areas. At the same time, there has been stark evidence to indicate that naively-trained models amplify biases in training data, and perform inconsistently across text relating to different demographic groupings of individuals. This project aims to systematically quantify the ext ....Fairness in Natural Language Processing. Natural language processing (NLP) has achieved spectacular commercial successes in recent years, and has been deployed across an ever-increasing breadth of devices and application areas. At the same time, there has been stark evidence to indicate that naively-trained models amplify biases in training data, and perform inconsistently across text relating to different demographic groupings of individuals. This project aims to systematically quantify the extent of such biases, and develop models that are both more socially equitable, as well as less prone to expose private data in the learned representations. In doing so, it will make NLP more accessible to new populations of users, and remove socio-technological barriers to NLP uptake.Read moreRead less
Beyond the grammar checker: automated copy-editing assistance. In the traditional publishing process, copy-editors correct and polish what authors write, but financial pressures mean that copy-editing is often considered a luxury. This project uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence techniques to develop technology that automates a significant proportion of the copy editing task.
Perceptually-motivated speech parameters for concurrent coding and noise-robust distributed recognition of human speech for mobile telephony systems. With speech being a simple and natural form of communication, speech recognition technology is being widely used in mobile phones. Nowadays, consumers can interact with remote systems via spoken words. This project will develop remote speech recognition with better accuracy and noise-robustness while using the existing mobile phone infrastructure.
Improved syntactic and semantic analysis for natural language processing. This project aims to improve the accuracy of syntactic and semantic analysis of natural language for automatic extraction of meaning from text. Many data mining and information extraction applications rely on syntactic and semantic analysis. Current analysis approaches are limited because they require expensive manually-labelled data. The project plans to develop new indirectly-supervised approaches to overcome this labell ....Improved syntactic and semantic analysis for natural language processing. This project aims to improve the accuracy of syntactic and semantic analysis of natural language for automatic extraction of meaning from text. Many data mining and information extraction applications rely on syntactic and semantic analysis. Current analysis approaches are limited because they require expensive manually-labelled data. The project plans to develop new indirectly-supervised approaches to overcome this labelled data bottleneck. By integrating information from large text corpora and structured databases, the project aims to minimise the reliance on manually-labelled data for training natural language processing systems. Automatic methods for syntactic and semantic analysis would have a wide range of applications in extracting information from large collections of unstructured data, such as hospital patient records or social media.Read moreRead less
Improving human reasoning with causal Bayes networks: a multimodal approach. This project aims to improve human causal and probabilistic reasoning about complex systems by taking a user-centric, multimodal, interactive approach. The project will explore new integrated visual and verbal ways of explaining a causal probabilistic model and its reasoning, to reduce known human reasoning difficulties, and investigate how to reduce cognitive load by prioritising the most useful user- and context-speci ....Improving human reasoning with causal Bayes networks: a multimodal approach. This project aims to improve human causal and probabilistic reasoning about complex systems by taking a user-centric, multimodal, interactive approach. The project will explore new integrated visual and verbal ways of explaining a causal probabilistic model and its reasoning, to reduce known human reasoning difficulties, and investigate how to reduce cognitive load by prioritising the most useful user- and context-specific information. Expected outcomes include novel AI methods that empower users to drive the reasoning process and strengthen trust in the system’s reasoning. Performance will be assessed in medical and legal domains, with significant potential benefits to end users from better, more transparent reasoning and decision making.Read moreRead less
Towards realistic verbal interactions between people and computers-a probabilistic approach. This project aims to facilitate natural spoken interactions between people and computer systems, addressing obstacles to the acceptance of these systems. We will investigate computational models for relevant aspects of spoken dialogue, which will be implemented in computer systems for diverse tasks (for example, home devices and phone-enabled services).
Subband centroids and deep neural networks for robust speech recognition. This project aims to improve the robustness and accuracy of automatic speech and speaker recognition systems. Though these systems work reasonably well in noise-free environments, their performance deteriorates drastically even in the presence of a small amount of noise. To overcome this problem, this project proposes a missing-feature approach for robust speech and speaker recognition. This approach is expected to make th ....Subband centroids and deep neural networks for robust speech recognition. This project aims to improve the robustness and accuracy of automatic speech and speaker recognition systems. Though these systems work reasonably well in noise-free environments, their performance deteriorates drastically even in the presence of a small amount of noise. To overcome this problem, this project proposes a missing-feature approach for robust speech and speaker recognition. This approach is expected to make the speech and speaker recognition systems less sensitive to additive background noise and make them more useful in telecommunications and business.Read moreRead less
Explaining the outcomes of complex computational models. This project aims to develop new algorithms that automatically generate explanations for the results produced by complex computational models. In recent times, these models have become increasingly accurate, and hence pervasive. However, the reasoning of Deep Neural Networks and Bayesian Networks, and of complex Regression models and Decision Trees is often unclear, impairing effective decision making by practitioners who use the results o ....Explaining the outcomes of complex computational models. This project aims to develop new algorithms that automatically generate explanations for the results produced by complex computational models. In recent times, these models have become increasingly accurate, and hence pervasive. However, the reasoning of Deep Neural Networks and Bayesian Networks, and of complex Regression models and Decision Trees is often unclear, impairing effective decision making by practitioners who use the results of these models or investigate the decisions made by the systems. Practical benefits of clear decision making reasoning by complex computational models include reduced risk, increased productivity and revenue, appropriate adoption of technologies including improved education for practitioners, and improved outcomes for end users. Significant benefits will be demonstrated through the evaluations with practitioners in the areas of healthcare and energy.Read moreRead less
Language engineering in the field: preserving 100 endangered languages in New Guinea. Efforts to preserve the world's endangered linguistic heritage are labour-intensive, and unable to keep up with the pace of language loss. This project investigates a new approach to language preservation, using techniques from language engineering, and leveraging the labour of mother-tongue speakers.
Automated assessment of data quality in biological knowledge resources. This project aims to develop methods for identifying poor quality data in biological databases. Research in biomedicine is underpinned by massive databases of biological data. Data quality is largely managed through manual curation, but automated methods to assess quality are critically needed. This project expects to develop a suite of computational tools for assessing biological data quality, utilising an innovative approa ....Automated assessment of data quality in biological knowledge resources. This project aims to develop methods for identifying poor quality data in biological databases. Research in biomedicine is underpinned by massive databases of biological data. Data quality is largely managed through manual curation, but automated methods to assess quality are critically needed. This project expects to develop a suite of computational tools for assessing biological data quality, utilising an innovative approach based on network analysis of database record connectivity. These tools will enable quantifying data quality at scale. Researchers, evidence-based decision-makers in biomedicine, and the analytical or predictive tools that use this data will make more reliable inferences and decisions.Read moreRead less