Curriculum Vitae

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[Personal photography]
Name : Diego Mollá-Aliod
Degree : PhD. in Linguistics, University of Edinburgh.
Address : Department of Computing,
Macquarie University,
Sydney NSW 2109, Australia
Phone : +61-2-9850-9531
Fax : +61-2-9850-9551
E-mail : diego@ics.mq.edu.au
URL : http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/~diego/
Research Objectives
The integration of theoretical linguistics into practical computer applications. Logical forms for natural language processing applications. Question answering. Formal semantics and aspectual composition.
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Most Significant Research Contributions

My research contribution is centered on the application of theoretical linguistics to specific real-world problems, in particular to automated text-based question answering. After completing an MSc in speech and language processing and a PhD on formal semantics at the University of Edinburgh, I joined the University of Zurich and became the principal researcher in the ExtrAns and WebExtrAns projects (from 1996 to 2001). Both projects were based on the development of answer extraction systems. Answer extraction systems locate those sentences in the source text that contain the answer posed by the user. The outcome of the project was a working system that handles questions about 500 manpages (a Web demo is available). I was the main contributor to the design of the logical forms and the question-answering method using the logical forms. The success of ExtrAns and WebExtrAns is evident from the fact that the system is widely cited as a pioneering question-answering system, an example of a question answering system of technical domains, and an example of the use of logical forms for question answering.

In Macquarie University I established the AnswerFinder project. AnswerFinder is a question answering system that combines the use of logical information (inspired from ExtrAns and WebExtrAns), state-of-the-art approaches in question answering, and innovative graph-based machine learning methods to find the exact answer to the user question. AnswerFinder has been participating in the question answering track of the Text REtrieval conference (TREC), the main international forum for the evaluation of question-answering systems, since 2003. AnswerFinder is in fact the only Australian-based question answering system that has participated in the question answering track of TREC. The main QA framework provided by AnswerFinder will be used as a starting point in the proposed project.

Currently I am frequently called to deliver invited talks and seminars, and to join the Program Committee of some of the main National and International workshops and conferences in the area.

Teaching

Years Organization Level Topic
2001-pres Macquarie University Undergraduate Lectures Computing and Language Technology
1995-96 The University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Lectures Logic
1990-91 Universitat Politècnica de València Undergraduate Lectures Theory of Programming

Courses taught in the last 3 years

YearCourse Keys
2006 SLP148, COMP125, COMP248, COMP448, ITEC830
2005 SLP148, COMP125, COMP448, CIII9173
2004SLP148, COMP125, COMP249, COMP453
2003SLP148, COMP248, COMP348, COMP453, ALTSS03-IEQA

Brief description of the courses:

ALTSS03-IEQA
Information Extraction and Question Answering, Summer school postgraduate course, ALTSS03, Melbourne
CIII9173
Sistemas de Búqueda de Respuestas, 10-hour seminar, Universidad Carlos III, Madrid, Spain
COMP125
Fundamentals of Computer Science, 1st-year undergraduate course, Macquarie University
COMP248
Language Technology, 2nd-year undergraduate course, Macquarie University
COMP249
Web Technology, 2nd-year undergraduate course, Macquarie University
COMP348
Document Processing and the Semantic Web, 3rd-year undergraduate course, Macquarie University
COMP448
Advanced Topics in Natural Language Processing, Honours course, Macquarie University
COMP453
Question Answering, Honours course, Macquarie University
ITEC830
XML Technologies
SLP148
Language, Logic, and Computation, 1st-year undergraduate course, Macquarie University

Postdoctoral Research
Years Organization & Department Location Job Title
2005-pres Macquarie University, Computing Sydney, Australia Senior Lecturer
2001-2004 Macquarie University, Computing Sydney, Australia Lecturer
Founding member of the Centre for Language Technology in the Division of Information and Communication Sciences; research in the extension of ExtrAns (see below) to perform more general question answering over larger volumes of data.
2000-01 University of Zurich, Computational Linguistics Zurich, Switzerland Senior Research Assistant
Extension of ExtrAns (see below) to WebExtrAns, a help-system over text documents formatted in XML. The test text was the maintenance manual of an Airbus commercial aircraft.
1996-99 University of Zurich, Computational Linguistics Zurich, Switzerland Senior Research Assistant
Implementation of ExtrAns, a help-system to parse and extract the logical forms of standard UNIX manual pages. The goal of ExtrAns is to parse and build the logical form of the query given by users (in plain English), and then extract those sentences whose logical forms can prove that of the query, from the manual pages. The project is funded by the Swiss National Fund.

Postgraduate Studies
Years Organization & Department Location Course
1992-96 University of Edinburgh, Linguistics Edinburgh, UK PhD in Aspect Composition
Dissertation on Aspectual Composition and Sentence Interpretation: A formal approach.
1994-95 Took leave and completed 1 year compulsory social service in Spain.
1991-92 University of Edinburgh, Linguistics Edinburgh, UK MSc in Speech and Language Processing
Dissertation on Integrating time into Discourse Representation Theory: A computational approach.
Graduated with Distinction.
1990-91 Universitat Politècnica de València, Computer Science Valencia, Spain Research in Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence
Automatic pattern recognition and its application to Speech Recognition and Computer Vision.

Undergraduate Studies
Years Organization Location Course
1985-90 Universitat Politècnica de València Valencia, Spain 5-yr degree in Computer Science
Dissertation on Inference of k-testable languages
Graduated with Distinction.
Awarded with the Third National Prize to the best degree in Computer Science (Tercer Premio Nacional de Terminación de Estudios de Lienciatura en Informática) by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia).

Grants

Years Source of Funding Amount Chief Investigators
2005 Macquarie University Safety Net $19,898 S. Cassidy, D. Mollá
  Information Access in Meeting Room Speech Archives
2004 Macquarie University MURDG $5,200 D. Mollá, M. Dras
Visit of Dr. Philippe Blache to enhance the development of new techniques for robust parsing and language understanding
2004-06 ARC Discovery $290,000 D. Mollá, R. Dale
A scalable and portable question-answering system
2003-05 ARC Linkage $56,000 D. Richards, D. Mollá, R. Schwitter
Achieving higher availability of storage subsystems through application of a self learning expert system.
2001 Macquarie University MUNS $18,000 D. Mollá
A fast and robust logical form generator using a third-party shallow parser.

Miscellaneous duties in the last 4 years (from 2003)

Years Description
2007
  • Secretary of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA)
  • Program committee member of:
    • ACL 07 workshop in Multilingual Question Answering
    • 12th international conference on application of natural language to information systems (NLDB07)
    • NLUCS07 workshop in Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science (NLPCS 2007)
    • Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (PACLING 2007)
    • SIGIR 2007 workshop on Challenges in Application-Oriented Question Answering
    • Australasian Language Technology Association workshop (ALTA 2007)
  • Reviewer in:
    • ACL 07
2006
  • Secretary of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA)
  • Reviewer in:
    • ACL 06 Student Research Workshop
  • Area chair (question answering, information extraction, information retrieval) in ACL 06
  • Program committee member of:
    • Australasian Language Technology Association workshop (ALTA 2006)
    • 11th international conference on application of natural language to information systems (NLDB06) and related special issue in the Journal of Data and Knowledge Engineering (DKE)
    • ACL Workshop on Emerging Challenges in Putting NLP into Practice
    • EACL Workshop on Multilingual Question Answering (MLQA06)
    • 3rd International Workshop on Natural Language Understanding and Cognitive Science (NLUCS-2006)
    • EACL Workshop on Robust Methods in Analysis of Natural language Data (ROMAND IV)
    • Special issue of Traitement Automatique de la Langue on Question Answering
  • Reviewer of grant proposals from the Australian Research Council
2005
  • Secretary of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA)
  • Co-chair of the 2005 AAAI Workshop on Question Answering in Restricted Domains
  • Co-editor of the Computational Linguistics special issue on Question Answering in Restricted Domains
  • Area chair for Question Answering in the Second International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP-05)
  • Reviewer in:
    • ACL 05 Student Research Workshop
  • Reviewer of proposals for funding of projects from the Australian Research Council and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research
  • Program committee member of:
    • 2005 Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTW 2005)
    • 2nd International Workshop on Natural Language Understanding and Cognitive Science (NLUCS-2005)
    • 10th international conference on application of natural language to information systems (NLDB05)
2004
  • Secretary of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA)
  • Organiser of the 2004 Australasian Language Technology Summer School (ALTSS 2004)
  • Co-chair of the ACL-04 workshop on Question Answering in Restricted Domains
  • Reviewer in:
    • Journal of Natural Language Engineering
  • Program committee member of:
    • Posters and demonstrations of ACL 2004
    • Organisation of workshops in COLING 2004
    • Workshop on Software Internationalisation (AWSI) in ACSW 04
    • 9th international conference on application of natural language to information systems (NLDB04)
    • 4th International Workshop on Natural Language and Information Systems (NLIS 2004)
    • Third workshop on Robust Methods in Analysis of Natural language Data (ROMAND'04)
2003
  • Secretary of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA)
  • Reviewer in:
    • Student workshop of the 41 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2003)
  • Program committee member of:
    • First Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTW 03)
    • 8th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB 2003)
    • 2003 International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering (NLP-KE'03)

Publications

Journal Articles

  1. D. Mollá and J. L. Vicedo. Question Answering in Restricted Domains: An Overview (2007). Computational Linguistics, 33(1):41-61.
  2. D. Mollá. Hacia el Uso de la Información Sintáctica y Semántica en los Sistemas de Búsqueda de Respuestas (2004). Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural, 33:17-24.
  3. D, Mollá, F. Rinaldi, R. Schwitter, J. Dowdall and M. Hess. ExtrAns: Extracting Answers from Technical Texts (2003). IEEE Intelligent Systems 18(4):12-17.
  4. D. Mollá, R. Schwitter, M. Hess, and R. Fournier. ExtrAns, an answer extraction system (2000). Traitement Automatique de Langues, 41(2):495-519.
  5. D. Mollá, G. Schneider, R. Schwitter, and M. Hess. Answer extraction using a dependency grammar in ExtrAns (2000). Traitement Automatique de Langues, 41(1):127-156.

Book Chapters

  1. E. Akhmatova and D. Mollá. Recognizing Textual Entailment via Atomic Propositions (2006). In Machine Learning Challenges, LNCS 3944/2006, Springer, pp385-403.
  2. F. Rinaldi, M. Hess, J. Dowdall, D. Mollá, and R. Schwitter. Question answering in terminology-rich technical domains (2004). In M. Maybury (ed.) New Directions in Question Answering, pp. 71-82. AAAI Press.
  3. K. Böttger, R. Schwitter, D. Mollá, and D. Richards. Towards Reconciling Use Cases Via Controlled Language and Graphical Models (2003). In O. Bartenstein, U. Geske, M. Hannebauer, O. Yoshie (eds.), Web-Knowledge Management and Decision Support, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2543, pp. 115-128, Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany.

Conference Papers

  1. L.A. Pizzato and D. Mollá. Indexing on Semantic Roles for Question Answering (2008). Proceedings COLING workshop on Information Retrieval for Question Answering (IR4QA), 8 pages. Manchester.
  2. D. Mollá, M. van Zaanen and S. Cassidy. Named Entity Recognition in Question Answering of Speech Data (2007). Proceedings ALTA 2007, 57-65, Melbourne. [poster]
  3. L.A. Pizzato and D. Mollá. Question Prediction Language Model (2007). Proceedings ALTA 2007, 92-99, Melbourne.
  4. M. van Zaanen and D. Mollá. A Named Entity Recogniser for Question Answering (2007). Proceedings PACLING 2007, 8 pages, Melbourne.
  5. M. van Zaanen and D. Mollá. AnswerFinder at QA @ CLEF 2007 (2007). Working Notes for the CLEF 2007 Workshop, 9 pages, Budapest.
  6. D. Mollá, S. Cassidy and M. van Zaanen. AnswerFinder at QAst 2007: Named Entity Recognition for QA on Speech Transcripts (2007). Working Notes for the CLEF 2007 Workshop, 9 pages, Budapest.
  7. D. Mollá, M. van Zaanen, L. Pizzato. AnswerFinder at TREC 2006. The Fifteenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2006) Proceedings. 8 pages.
  8. D. Mollá, M. van Zaanen, and D. Smith. Named Entity Recognition for Question Answering (2006). Proceedings ALTW 2006, 8 pages, Sydney.
  9. L.A. Pizzato, D. Mollá, and C. Paris. Pseudo Relevance Feedback Using Named Entities for Question Answering (2006). Proceedings ALTW 2006, 8 pages, Sydney.
  10. D. Mollá and S. Wan. Macquarie University at DUC 2006: Question Answering for Summarisation (2006). Proceedings DUC 2006, 62-69 [poster].
  11. D. Mollá. Learning of Graph-based Question Answering Rules (2006). Proceedings HLT/NAACL 2006 Workshop on Graph Algorithms for Natural Language Processing, 37-44.
  12. D. Mollá and M. van Zaanen. AnswerFinder at TREC 2005 (2006). The Fourteenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2005), 9 pages.
  13. D. Mollá and M. van Zaanen. Learning of Graph Rules for Question Answering (2005). Proc. ALTW05, 9 pages, Sydney, December 2005.
  14. L.A. Pizzato and D. Mollá. Extracting Exact Answers using a Meta Question Answering System (2005). Proc. ALTW05, pp. 105-111, Sydney, December 2005 [poster].
  15. M. van Zaanen, L.A. Pizzato and D. Mollá. Classifying Sentences Using Induced Structure (2005). Proc. Twelfth Edition of the Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE2005), pp. 139-150, Buenos Aires, November 2005.
  16. M. van Zaanen, L.A. Pizzato and D. Mollá. Question Classification by Structure Induction (2005) . In Leslie Pack Kaelbling (ed.), Proc. Nineteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI05), poster presentation, Edinburgh, July 2005. ISBN 0-938075-93-4.
  17. D. Mollá and M. Gardiner. AnswerFinder at TREC 2004 (2005). The Thirteenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2004), http://trec.nist.gov/pubs.html.
  18. D. Mollá and M. Gardiner. AnswerFinder - Question Answering by Combining Lexical, Syntactic and Semantic Information (2004). Proc. ALTW04, pp. 9-16, Sydney, December 2004.
  19. D. Mollá. AnswerFinder in TREC 2003 (2004). The Twelth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2003), http://trec.nist.gov/pubs.html.
  20. D. Mollá. Towards Semantic-Based Overlap Measures for Question Answering (2003). Proc. ALTW03, 8 pages, Melbourne, December 2003.
  21. F. Rinaldi, J. Dowdall, M. Hess, D. Mollá, R. Schwitter, and K. Kaljurand. Knowledge-Based Question Answering (2003). Proc. KES'2003 -- Seventh International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems, 3-5 September 2003, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2773, pp. 785-792. Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany.
  22. F. Rinaldi, J. Dowdall, K. Kaljurand, M. Hess, D. Mollá. Exploiting Paraphrases in a Question Answering System (2003). Proc. Workshop in Paraphrasing at ACL2003, pp. 25-32. July 11, Sapporo, Japan.
  23. D. Mollá, R. Schwitter, F. Rinaldi, J. Dowdall, M. Hess. Anaphora Resolution in ExtrAns (2003). 2003 International Symposium on Reference Resolution and Its Applications to Question Answering and Summarization, June 23-25, Venice, Italy.
  24. D. Mollá and B. Hutchinson. Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Evaluations of Parsing Systems (2003). Proceedings European Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), workshop on Evaluation Initiatives in Natural Language Processing, pp. 43-50. Budapest, 14 April 2003.
  25. D. Mollá, R. Schwitter, F. Rinaldi, J. Dowdall, M. Hess. Natural Language Processing for Answer Extraction in Technical Domains (2003). Proceedings European Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), workshop on Natural Language Processing for Question Answering, pp. 5-12. Budapest, 14 April.
  26. R. Dale, D. Mollá, R. Schwitter. Natural Language Processing in the Undergraduate Curriculum (2003). Proc. Fifth Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE2003), pp. 9-13. Adelaide, Australia.
  27. D. Mollá and B. Hutchinson. Dependency-based semantic interpretation for answer extraction (2002). Proc. 2002 Australasian NLP Workshop (ANLP'02), pp. 21-32. Canberra.
  28. R. Dale, D. Mollá, and R. Schwitter. Evangelising Language Technology: A practically-focussed undergraduate program (2002). Proc. ACL 2002 Workshop on Effective Tools and Methodologies for Teaching NLP and Computational Linguistics, pp. 27-32. Philadelphia.
  29. F. Rinaldi, J. Dowdall, M. Hess, D. Mollá and Rolf Schwitter Towards Answer Extraction: An Application to Technical Domains (2002). In F. van Harmelen (ed.), ECAI 2002, Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, July 21-26. IOS Press, Amsterdam, pp. 460-464.
  30. F. Rinaldi, M. Hess, D. Mollá, R. Schwitter, J. Dowdall, G. Schneider, and R. Fournier. Answer Extraction in Technical Domains (2002). In A. Gelbukh (ed.), Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, 3rd International Conference CICLing-2002 February 17-23, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, pp. 360-369.
  31. K. Böttger, R. Schwitter, D. Richards, O. Aguilera, and D. Mollá. Reconciling Use Cases via Controlled Language and Graphical Models (2001). Proc. 14th International Conference of Applications of Prolog (INAP 2001), 10 pages. Tokyo.
  32. D. Mollá and R. Schwitter. From plain English to controlled English (2001). Proc. 2001 Australasian Natural Language Processing Workshop, 7 pages. Sydney.
  33. D. Mollá. Towards incremental semantic annotation (2001). Proc. First International Workshop on Multimedia Annotation (MMA-2001), 10 pages. Tokyo.
  34. D. Mollá. Ontologically promiscuous flat logical forms for NLP (2001). Proc. Fourth International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS-4), pp. 249-265. Tilburg.
  35. W. Vasconcelos, R. Schwitter, D. Mollá, J. Cavalcanti. Implementing Prolog-Run WWW Sites (2000). Proc. 13th International Conference on Applications of Prolog (INAP2000), pp. 60-65. Waseda University, Tokyo.
  36. R. Schwitter, D. Mollá, R. Fournier, and M. Hess. Answer extraction: Towards better evaluation of NLP systems (2000). Proc. Workshop on Reading Comprehension Texts, ANLP-NAACL2000. Seattle.
  37. D. Mollá and M. Hess. Dealing with ambiguities in an answer extraction system (2000). Proc. ATALA Workshop on Representation and Treatment of Ambiguity in Natural Language Processing. Paris.
  38. R. Schwitter, D. Mollá, and M. Hess. ExtrAns. Answer extraction from technical documents by minimal logical forms and selective highlighting (1999). To appear in Proc. Third International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation, Batumi, Georgia.
  39. G. Schneider, D. Mollá, and M. Hess. Inkrementelle minimale logische Formen für die Antwortextraction (1999). To appear in Proc. 34th Colloquium of Linguistics, University of Mainz, Germersheim, Germany.
  40. D. Mollá and M. Hess. On the scalability of the answer extraction system ``ExtrAns'' (1999). Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB'99), Klagenfurt, Austria. 219-224.
  41. D. Mollá, J. Berri, and M. Hess. A real world implementation of answer extraction (1998). In Proc. of the 9th International Conference and Workshop on Database and Expert Systems. Workshop ``Natural Language and Information Systems'' (NLIS'98), Vienna. 143-148.
  42. J. Berri, D. Mollá, and M. Hess. Extraction automatique de réponses: implémentation du système ExtrAns (1998). In Proc. of the 5e Conférence Annuelle sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles (TALN 1998), Paris. 12-21.
  43. D. Mollá. Aspectual composition and our (linguistic) interpretation of the world (1996). Departmental Conference of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh. On-line publication.
  44. D. Mollá. On the aspectual interactions between verbs and NPs (1996). The 5th Manchester University Postgraduate Linguistics Conference. In Papers in Linguistcs from the University of Manchester, 1(1):129-143, Manchester University.
  45. D. Mollá. On the influences of noun phrases in the determination of the sentence aspectual class (1994). In Proceedings of the Edinburgh Linguistics Department Conference '94. Department of Linguistics, University of Edinburgh. 126-135.

Other Publications

  1. D. Mollá and J. L. Vicedo (Eds.) Special Section on Question Answering in Restricted Domains (2007). Computational Linguistics, 33(1).
  2. D. Mollá and J. L. Vicedo (Eds.) Proceedings of the AAAI 2005 Workshop in Question Answering in Restricted Domains (2005).
  3. D. Mollá and J. L. Vicedo (Eds.). Proceedings of the ACL 2004 Workshop in Question Answering in Restricted Domains (2004).
  4. S. Geldof and D. Mollá (Eds.) Proceedings 2002 Australasian NLP Workshop (2002), Canberra.

References

Available on request.