Language Technology Group

Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering
The University of Melbourne
Victoria 3010, Australia

Most human knowledge, and most human communication, are represented and expressed using language, both in written and spoken forms. Language technologies permit computers to process human language, providing more natural human-machine interfaces, and more sophisticated access to stored information. Language technologies will play a central role in the multilingual information society of the future.

The language technology group is conducting research in statistical language modelling, language understanding, knowledge discovery, linguistic annotation, high performance computing, and digital language archiving.

Regular Local Activities: The LT Group has a regular seminar series, group lunch, a reading group and a writing group.

Student projects

FOKS Demo

JLPT 3/4 Kanji Tester Demo (hone your Japanese reading and writing skills online)

Forthcoming Seminars: Upcoming LT Seminars can be viewed via Google Calendar. Subscribe to the lt-seminars mailing list.

Staff

	Tim Baldwin Associate Professor ICT-6.08 x41363 home Lexical acquisition, information extraction, web mining and computational lexical semantics.			Steven Bird Associate Professor ICT-6.07 x41361 home Formal and computational models for linguistic annotation, analysis and documentation.
	Lawrence Cavedon NICTA Senior Research Fellow ICT-6.13 x41282 home Multimodal Dialog			Rebecca Dridan Research Fellow ICT-6.05   home Deep linguistic processing
	Su Nam Kim Research Fellow ICT-6.05   home Language identification and web mining			David Martinez NICTA Research Fellow 193-2.22 x41406 home text mining, information extraction, biomedical text processing
	Patrick Ye Research Fellow ICT-6.09   home Automatic summarisation, text mining			Lars Yencken NICTA Research Engineer 193-2.22   home Biomedical text mining

Students

	Clint Burfoot PhD Student ICT-6.05 Unsupervised and semi-supervised information extraction from the web			Jim Breen PhD Student ICT-6.05 home Extraction of neologisms in Japanese corpora			Richard Fothergill Masters Student ICT-6.05 home WSD in translation aids for second language learners
	Sumukh Ghodke PhD Student ICT-6.05 Querying Databases of Hierarchical Time-Series Annotations			Karl Grieser PhD Student ICT-6.05 Imparting Narrative on Sequences of Physical Objects with Sparse Data			Marco Lui Honours Student   Text categorisation and language identification
	Andrew MacKinlay PhD Student ICT-6.05 Information extraction over diverse domains using deep parsing techniques			Olivia March Masters Student ICT-6.05 Multi-document summarisation			Jeremy Nicholson PhD Student ICT-6.05 home Bootstrapping deep lexical acquisition
	Willy Yap PhD Student ICT-6.05 home Information extraction toolkit

Publications

Past Students and Theses:

• Marco Lui (2009), Impact of User Characteristics on Online Forum Classification Tasks [Honours thesis]
• Patrick Ye (2008), Natural Language Understanding in Controlled Virtual Environments [Ph.D thesis]
• Meladel Mistica (2008), Towards the Utilisation of Information Structure to Predict Word Order in Tagalog [PostDip thesis]
• Su Nam Kim (2008) Statistical modeling of multiword expressions [PhD thesis]
• Edward Ivanovic (2008) Automatic instant messaging dialogue using statistical models and dialogue acts [Masters thesis]
• Rod Farmer (2007) A conceptual framework for situated task analysis within the context of Computer-Assisted Language Learning system design [PhD thesis]
• Willy Yap (2007) Context-sensitive glossing of Japanese web pages [Honours thesis]
• Benjamin Goudey (2007) Gene identification and normalisation in biomedical texts [Honours thesis]
• Joseph Paterson (2007) Robust recognition in spoken dialogue systems [Honours thesis]
• Michael Yang (2007) Dynamically Detecting and Modelling the Visitor's Interests in a Museum Environment [Honours thesis]
• Robert Marshall (2007) Improving the efficiency and capabilities of document structuring [Masters thesis]
• Philip Blunsom (2007) Structured Classication for Multilingual Natural Language Processing [PhD thesis]
• Rebecca Dridan (2006) Using Minimal Recursion Semantics in Japanese question answering [Masters thesis]
• Aidan Furlan (2006) The Production of Meaningful Route Directions Using Landmark Extraction [Honours thesis]
• Karl Grieser (2006) Analysis and prediction of user behaviour in a museum environment [Honours thesis]
• Trevor Cohn (2006) Generalizing conditional random fields for natural language processing [PhD thesis]
• David Penton (2006) XML technologies for modelling, exploring and visualizing linguistic data [Masters thesis]
• Catherine Lai (2006) A Formal Framework for Linguistic Tree Query [Masters thesis]
• Jeremy Nicholson (2005) Statistical Interpretation of Compound Nouns [Honours thesis]
• Andrew MacKinlay (2005) The Effects of Part-of-Speech Tagsets on Tagger Performance [Honours thesis]
• Charlotte Wilson (2004) Combining Part of Speech Induction and Morphological Induction [Honours thesis]
• Olivia March (2004) Natural language as an Agent Communication Language [Honours thesis]
• James Noble (2003) Spoken Emotion Recognition with Support Vector Machines [Honours thesis]
• Claire Taylor (2003) XSLT as a Linguistic Query Language [Honours thesis]

Past staff:

• Shlomo Berkovsky (2007-2008)
• Nicola Stokes (2005-2008)
• Daniel Walmsley (2005-2006)
• Baden Hughes (2003-2006)
• Dave Penton (2003-2005)
• Amol Kamat (2003-2005)
• Cathy Bow (2003-2004)

• August 2003: Steven Bird and collaborators at the University of Pennsylvania receive an NSF grant for research on Querying Linguistic Databases
• March 2004: Steven Bird and Baden Hughes receive research contract from AIATSIS for AustLang Indigenous Languages Database
• December 2004: Steven Bird and Baden Hughes receive research contract from AIATSIS for AustLang Indigenous Languages Database
• January 2005: NICTA Project in Interactive Information Discovery and Delivery
• August 2005: Tim Baldwin, Steven Bird and Baden Hughes receive ARC Special Research Initiative (E-Research) Grant for "An Intelligent Search Infrastructure for Language Resources on the Web"
• August 2005: Baden Hughes and collaborators at University of Queensland and Australian National University receive ARC Special Research Initiative (E-Research) Grant for "Development of Tool Interfaces and Data Standards for Enabling Remote Secondary Analysis of Qualitative Data"
• November 2005: Tim Baldwin receives ARC Discovery Grant for "Information Delivery from Segmented Textual Data Streams"
• December 2005: Steven Bird and Baden Hughes receive NSW Department of Aboriginal Affairs Research Contract for NSW Aboriginal Languages Database".
• February 2006: Baden Hughes and James Curran (University of Sydney) receive VPAC E-Research Grant for "A High Performance Distributed Natural Language Processing Architecture for Interactive Parse Annotation".
• September 2006: Steven Bird, Tim Baldwin and collaborators at The University of Melbourne receive ARC Discovery Grant for "Personalised Content Delivery for Assisted Navigation of Information Rich, Physical Environments such as a Museum"
• 2009-2011 : Timothy Baldwin, OLE (ARC Discovery Project: Online Linguistic Exploration: Deeper, Faster, Broader Language Documentation)
• 2008-20011 : Cavedon, Zobel, Bailey, Moffat, Bird, et al.: Biological Text and Language Applications (BioTALA : NICTA project)
• 2008-2009 : Timothy Baldwin, Web-scale Language Identification: All Languages Great and Small (Google Research Award)
• 2008-2009 : Timothy Baldwin, Web User Forum Text Analysis (Microsoft Research Asia Research Award)
• 2006-2008 : Timothy Baldwin, Information Delivery from Segmented Textual Data Streams (ILIAD : ARC Discovery Project)
• Steven Bird, NICTA Information Discovery Project
• Steven Bird, Querying Linguistic Databases
• Steven Bird, OLAC: Open Language Archives Community
• Steven Bird, NLTK: Natural Language Toolkit
• Steven Bird, AGTK: Annotation Graph Toolkit
• Steven Bird, E-MELD: Preserving Endangered Languages
• Steven Bird, PARADISEC: Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures
• Steven Bird, LanguageLog: A Weblog about Language
• Steven Bird, ARC Network in Human Communication Science
• Other projects: [ CSSE Knowledge Discovery Group | Research in CSSE ]

Other Melbourne University staff interested in language technology:

• David Grayden (Electrical Engineering)
• Paul Gruba (Language and Linguistics)
• Alistair Moffat (Computer Science and Software Engineering)
• Nick Nicholas (French and Italian Studies)
• Nick Thieberger (Language and Linguistics)
• Shigeko Naryiama (Asia Institute)
• Justin Zobel (NICTA)

And others in Melbourne:

• Randy La Polla (Linguistics, Latrobe University)
• Yuval Marom (GAPbuster Worldwide)
• Sandra Uitdenbogerd (Computer Science, RMIT University)
• Ingrid Zukerman (Computer Science and Software Engineering, Monash University)
• Simon Musgrave (Linguistics, Monash University)
• Jim Breen (Computer Science and Software Engineering, Monash University

Some recent international visitors to the department who work in language technology:

• Assis Prof Min-Yen Kan, National University of Singapore
• Dr Ondřej Bojar, Charles University
• Dr Eiji Aramaki, University of Tokyo Hospital
• Prof Hans Uszkoreit, Saarland University
• Dr Francis Bond, NICT
• Prof Ewan Klein, University of Edinburgh
• Assoc Prof Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University
• Dr Diana McCarthy, University of Sussex
• Mr Takaaki Tanaka, NTT Communication Science Laboratories
• Dr Gary Simons, SIL International
• Prof Stephan Oepen, University of Oslo
• Prof Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto
• Prof Kristina Jokkinen, University of Helsinki
• Assoc Prof Suad Awab, University of Malaya
• Dr Corrin Lakeland, University of Otago
• Dr Slaven Bilac, Google Japan
• Dr Lawrence Cavedon, Stanford University, USA
• Prof Bruce Croft, University of Massachussets, Amherst, USA
• Prof Dafydd Gibbon, Bielefeld University, Germany
• Prof Mark Johnson, Brown University, USA
• Dr Mark Sanderson, Sheffield University, UK
• Prof Harold Somers, UMIST, UK
• Prof Mark Steedman, Edinburgh University, UK
• Prof Bonnie Webber, Edinburgh University, UK
• Mr Peter Wittenburg, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands

Summer Interns

• Marco Lui (2007-08)
• Daniel Angley (2007-08)
• Ned Letcher (2007-08)
• Willy Yap (2007-08)
• Zhe Hong Lim (2006-07)
• Richard Penman (2006-07)
• Sam Huston (2006-07)
• Rami Tabbara (2005-06)
• Yuye Zhang (2005-06)
• Peter Hyun Jeen Lee (2005-06)
• Brianna Laugher (2005-06)
• Eric Huang (2005-06)
• Jeremy Nicholson (2004-05)
• David Penton (2003-04)
• Amol Kamat (2003-04)

Useful Links

• ALTA Workshops in language technology
• ACL Anthology
• NLTK: Natural Language Toolkit
• Natural Language Engineering
• ALTA: Australasian Language Technology Association
• TEL-Forum: Technology for Endangered Languages
• ACLwiki
• HCSNet

University of Melbourne Subjects Relevant to Language Technology

The following subjects include content that is closely related to language technology, or that is good preparation for language technology research.

• 800-123 Logic: Language and Information
• 800-204 Language and Computation
• 433-327/433-487 Knowledge Technologies
• 433-611 Web Search and Text Analysis
• 175-015 Syntax
• 175-016 Semantics
• 615-348 Human Computer Interaction
• 620-201 Probability