Menno van Zaanen's homepage

You found Menno van Zaanen's homepage.

I am a member of ICS, which is part of the Department of Computing at Macquarie University.

At the moment I am working on several projects. The list here also contains project that I've worked on in the past, but which still attract my interest.

Question Answering

At the moment, I'm working with Diego Mollá Aliod, Elena Akhmatova, and Luiz Augusto Pizzato on the AnswerFinder project. In this project, we develop a system that uses high-level attributes, such as logical forms, in a question answering system.

Alignment-Based Learning (ABL)

This is a grammar acquisition and bootstrapping system. It generates a treebank based on a non-structured, un-tagged corpus of sentences. My PhD thesis was about this work.

Machine Translation

I recently did some work on machine translation. This includes work on the evaluation of machine translation systems (work with Simon Zwarts) and I have also developed DEMOCRAT (work with Harold Somers), a consensus translation system.

Inducing structure in multi-lingual corpora

With Jeroen Geertzen I have developed TABL (Translation using ABL). Using ABL, we find structure in two languages and learn a mapping between the structures. This automatically learns a machine translation system.

Multi-Modal Information Retrieval

I worked on the VindIT project when I worked at ILK at Tilburg University. You might still find a demo, developed for the ImageCLEF competition here.

Spellchecker for african languages

This is a project in combination with Gerhard van Huyssteen at the University of Potchefstroom (now North-West University). We have developed spelling checkers for african languages.

Parsing metrical information in music

Together with Rens Bod and Henkjan Honing, I worked on parsers that can find information such as meter on bar and sub-bar levels.

More information on this can be found in my publications or in the software page.