Below is a list of possible projects for Honours and Masters students at Macquarie University. Please contact me for further details. Also, if you have a project in mind which is not listed here but that is related to my research interests, contact me and chances are that I will be interested too.
Many of these projects are related to AnswerFinder. AnswerFinder is a question answering system that finds the answer to an arbitrary question by exploring text documents. He have built a prototype of the system but there are still a lot of things to do.
Folksonomies are tags created by the public, such as the tags used in del.icio.us and in www.flickr.com. For this project you will work with these tags for mining for information. Stuff that can be mined could be to find related tags, detect synonyms and spelling errors, or suggest a set of tags given a short business description. If you're interested, include a proposal of what you want do with these tags and we will explore the possibilities.
Our system currently uses very simple rules to determine the type of information a question is asking for. The goal of this project is to build a question classification system that automatically learns the types of questions by analysing a corpus that is annotated with the correct question types. This project is especially suitable to those who are doing COMP348 in the first semester of 2007.
Currently we are developing a system that answers complex questions where the answer needs to be composed by exploring several documents. The current system simply presents all sentences that have some part of the answer but this can be done better. The goal of this project is to combine the independent answers in such a way that the resulting answer is coherent and has reduced redundancy.
AnswerFinder uses logical forms to determine if a sentence contains the answer to the question. These logical forms, however, are rather difficult to understand by humans and therefore the process of manually discovering inference rules to add to the system is time-consuming. The goal of this project is to determine methods to simplify the representation of logical forms to the user. The methods may be a combination of graphical expressions (e.g. represent the dependencies between the concepts graphically) or natural language generation (e.g. write a paraphrase that accurately describes the contents of the logical form), or something else. You decide!
A sentence is a structured collection of words. This structure can be represented as a graph where the nodes are the concepts expressed in the sentence, and the arcs are the relations between the concepts. The aim of this project is to explore the use of such graphs as means of sentence representation for the task of question answering. The project will involve the automatic creation of the graph, the use of graph theory methods to determine if a sentence can answer a specific question, and the extraction of the exact answer from the question.
Find all documents relevant to a topic, and with them compose a summary (this could be easily extended to a PhD project)
Human translators often find it difficult to determine the exact translation of technical terms in specialised areas. The goal of this project is to build a system that, given a term in a specific document, uses the Web to find the most likely translations in the target language. This project combines multilingual information retrieval techniques with machine translation techniques.
Every summer the Department of Computing offers a number of vacation scholarships to current students of the Department undergraduate degrees. Typically the scholarships cover about 6 weeks of full time work in a specific project. This is an excellent opportunity to gain working experience, or to test your research abilities if you are considering doing Honours or a PhD.
Many of the Honours/Masters projects listed above can be adapted to Vacation scholarships. In addition you could try one of these:
The goal of this project is to convert AnswerFinder, our question answering system, into a Web Service. The details of how this could be done are available in:
Required background: Good programming skills in C++; experience with web technology (e.g. Pass grade in COMP249).
Desired background: Experience with XML programming; experience with Web Services.
A Masters student has developed a set of question-answering patterns as part of her project. The task of this project is to build a system that tests these patterns on a collection of questions and answer candidates.
Required background: Good programming skills, preferably in C++.
Desired background: Pass grade in SLP148, COMP248, or COMP348.
AnswerFinder currently uses a very simple method to classify questions. The task of this project is to expand the current method by introducing patterns based on syntactic information and/or machine learning techniques.
Required background: Good programming skills, preferably in C++; Pass grade in SLP148, COMP248, or COMP348.
Desired background: Experience in programming in a group.