Information Delivery from Segmented Textual Data Streams. This project will contribute to the advancement of ICT innovation in Australia by developing a robust, reusable language understanding engine. The technology will be tailored to web applications, in the form of a conceptually-aware web search engine capable of tracking cross-document dialogues and identifying the core semantic thread of the dialogue. It will place Australia at the forefront of next-generation language technology developme ....Information Delivery from Segmented Textual Data Streams. This project will contribute to the advancement of ICT innovation in Australia by developing a robust, reusable language understanding engine. The technology will be tailored to web applications, in the form of a conceptually-aware web search engine capable of tracking cross-document dialogues and identifying the core semantic thread of the dialogue. It will place Australia at the forefront of next-generation language technology development, with applications in areas including concept-based multi-document summarisation and email surveillance.Read moreRead less
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
Discovering justified knowledge from data. Knowledge discovery from data has assumed a critical role in numerous areas of science, commerce and public administration. However, its effectiveness is limited by the undesirable propensity of current techniques to make many false, as well as real, discoveries. This research will rectify that problem, a critical outcome given the potential cost of making decisions or setting policy using flawed information. For example, it may prevent the adoption of ....Discovering justified knowledge from data. Knowledge discovery from data has assumed a critical role in numerous areas of science, commerce and public administration. However, its effectiveness is limited by the undesirable propensity of current techniques to make many false, as well as real, discoveries. This research will rectify that problem, a critical outcome given the potential cost of making decisions or setting policy using flawed information. For example, it may prevent the adoption of ineffective strategies for addressing land degradation; inappropriately targeted public health expenditure; expensive development and clinical trialing of drugs which prove ineffective; and wasted police and security investigations into unfounded suspicions of criminal or terrorist activity.Read moreRead less
Modelling and Removal of Noise and Artefacts in Surveillance and Security Video for Forensic Image Analysis and Enhancement. This project spearheads research in advanced digital image and video processing technology, placing Australia at the forefront of both theoretical and applied research to safeguard Australia. It tackles fundamental issues identified in our earlier research in this area and consulting work for Victoria and NSW Police Departments in forensic investigations since 2000. Althou ....Modelling and Removal of Noise and Artefacts in Surveillance and Security Video for Forensic Image Analysis and Enhancement. This project spearheads research in advanced digital image and video processing technology, placing Australia at the forefront of both theoretical and applied research to safeguard Australia. It tackles fundamental issues identified in our earlier research in this area and consulting work for Victoria and NSW Police Departments in forensic investigations since 2000. Although the main investigation focuses on video surveillance and security systems for public safety, policing, crime prevention and border control, the outcomes of the investigation will have other applications, including digital photography for fine-art, medical imaging, picture archiving and communication systems for telemedicine and rural healthcare systems.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
A Minimum Message Length Approach for Discourse Interpretation. The ability to communicate with computer systems in Natural Language has great potential to improve the overall experience for users. However, current systems support only limited means of communication. In this project, we propose to investigate the application of model-selection techniques for interpreting human discourse. In particular, we will consider situations where the computer interprets users' discourse in the context of i ....A Minimum Message Length Approach for Discourse Interpretation. The ability to communicate with computer systems in Natural Language has great potential to improve the overall experience for users. However, current systems support only limited means of communication. In this project, we propose to investigate the application of model-selection techniques for interpreting human discourse. In particular, we will consider situations where the computer interprets users' discourse in the context of its own knowledge. The versatility of our approach will be demonstrated by using it to (1) interpret discourse in a human-computer dialogue, (2) provide feedback to short essays, and (3) determine the impact of a document on a model.Read moreRead less
Learning Semi-Naive Bayesian Classifiers from Numeric Data. This project addresses research priority 3, offering frontier technologies. It will deliver better and faster classification technologies that greatly help accomplish many real-world tasks including medical diagnosis, fraud detection, spam filtering and webpage search, where accurate and fast classification is critical to save life, increase efficiency, reduce crime and conserve resources. Hence this project addresses priority 4 as well ....Learning Semi-Naive Bayesian Classifiers from Numeric Data. This project addresses research priority 3, offering frontier technologies. It will deliver better and faster classification technologies that greatly help accomplish many real-world tasks including medical diagnosis, fraud detection, spam filtering and webpage search, where accurate and fast classification is critical to save life, increase efficiency, reduce crime and conserve resources. Hence this project addresses priority 4 as well, better safeguarding Australia from disease and crime. This project will also support a young research group of international standing. It will train the involved researchers to attain a high level of proficiency and excellence in machine learning research and development.Read moreRead less
Adaptive Vector Filters for the Restoration of Digital Colour Images. Colour image restoration has very important applications in colour cameras, robotic navigation, video security systems, multimedia communications, and digital TV broadcast. Conventional vector filters have difficulty in simultaneously achieving three major objectives: noise suppression, detail preservation, and chromaticity retention. This project aims at formulating and evaluating novel adaptive filters to accomplish the th ....Adaptive Vector Filters for the Restoration of Digital Colour Images. Colour image restoration has very important applications in colour cameras, robotic navigation, video security systems, multimedia communications, and digital TV broadcast. Conventional vector filters have difficulty in simultaneously achieving three major objectives: noise suppression, detail preservation, and chromaticity retention. This project aims at formulating and evaluating novel adaptive filters to accomplish the three objectives simultaneously. Theoretical basis will be investigated for devising different adaptive filters to restore colour images and video sequences contaminated by various types of noise. The new filters will provide significant improvement over exiting techniques, yielding better tools and packages for colour image processing and restoration applications.Read moreRead less
Resource-bounded adaptive inference of accurate conditional probability estimates from data. This project will develop machine learning techniques with a valuable new capability: the ability to produce estimates of complex conditional probabilities to varying levels of expected accuracy depending upon the constraints of available computational resources. This will provide significant competitive advantage to developers of many types of online application by allowing them to maximise utilisation ....Resource-bounded adaptive inference of accurate conditional probability estimates from data. This project will develop machine learning techniques with a valuable new capability: the ability to produce estimates of complex conditional probabilities to varying levels of expected accuracy depending upon the constraints of available computational resources. This will provide significant competitive advantage to developers of many types of online application by allowing them to maximise utilisation of available computational resources when making inferences from data, together with the flexibility to trade-off accuracy and computing resources during system design. Australia will also benefit by strengthening its machine learning expertise, which is central to many complex and intelligent systems and the booming data mining industry.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).