Making human place knowledge digestible by computers. This project aims to develop the tools that will enable people to interact intuitively with computers about places and the relations between places. People understand their environment in a different way to computers; they think of places and their relations, while computers use coordinates and maps. People’s interaction with maps is cognitively costly and error-prone, which is becoming untenable in situations needing time-critical decision m ....Making human place knowledge digestible by computers. This project aims to develop the tools that will enable people to interact intuitively with computers about places and the relations between places. People understand their environment in a different way to computers; they think of places and their relations, while computers use coordinates and maps. People’s interaction with maps is cognitively costly and error-prone, which is becoming untenable in situations needing time-critical decision making. The project will revolutionise the design of information services where computers deal with humans and location in time-critical or stressful situations, including emergency calls, disaster response and local search queries. The uptake of this design by industry will lead to economic benefits as well as a safer society living in a smarter environment.Read moreRead less
Personalised topic modelling and sentiment analysis for enhanced information discovery over document streams. This project will develop personalised information discovery, navigation and management systems of online content for the creative industries, e.g. to help advertising agencies understand market trends, and enable designers to discover and analyse information relating to new product concepts.
Information access through web-scale question-answer pair finding, ranking and matching. This project will aim to take web search to a new level of sophistication in accepting queries in the form of complex natural language questions, and returning a ranked list of natural language answers automatically extracted from a broad range of web user forums.
Learning Deep Semantics for Automatic Translation between Human Languages. This project seeks to integrate deep linguistics and deep learning to improve translation quality. The modern world relies increasingly on automatic translation of human languages to deal with billions of documents. Current translation systems struggle with complex texts and often produce misleading or incoherent outputs. Furthermore, they translate sentences independently and ignore their overall document-wide context. T ....Learning Deep Semantics for Automatic Translation between Human Languages. This project seeks to integrate deep linguistics and deep learning to improve translation quality. The modern world relies increasingly on automatic translation of human languages to deal with billions of documents. Current translation systems struggle with complex texts and often produce misleading or incoherent outputs. Furthermore, they translate sentences independently and ignore their overall document-wide context. This project seeks to address these issues by developing a new approach using semantics – the underlying meaning of the text – to drive translation, both as discrete structures and continuous representations learned via deep learning. This may improve translation quality, thereby improving automatic translation for end-users.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.
Spoken conversational search: contextual interactive techniques to support effective information search over a speech-only communication channel. This project will develop new techniques for effective information search using speech only, supporting improved information access for visually impaired people or in situations that require focused visual attention (e.g. driving). The techniques are based on a conversational approach to information search and presentation of results.
Talking about place: tapping human knowledge to enrich national spatial data sets. Place descriptions are a common way for people to describe a location, but no current tools are smart enough to understand them. Emergency call centres are risking lives, users of navigation or web services are frustrated and addressing these problems costs billions of dollars per year. This project comes with a novel, interdisciplinary approach to automatically interpret human place descriptions and will develop ....Talking about place: tapping human knowledge to enrich national spatial data sets. Place descriptions are a common way for people to describe a location, but no current tools are smart enough to understand them. Emergency call centres are risking lives, users of navigation or web services are frustrated and addressing these problems costs billions of dollars per year. This project comes with a novel, interdisciplinary approach to automatically interpret human place descriptions and will develop novel methods to capture placenames with their meaning for smarter databases and automatic interpretation procedures. This acquired knowledge will be an important step forward for Australia's data custodians and users. Australia's location information industry will gain a significant advantage on a highly competitive global market.Read moreRead less
Responding to requests and situations in assistive computer systems - a decision-theoretic approach. This project aims to enable computer agents to respond appropriately to people's spoken requests and circumstances (e.g., ask questions or perform actions). This project will investigate computational models for response generation, which will be implemented in assistive computer systems, thus enabling people to interact more easily with these systems.
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).
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