Melbourne Laureate Professor Associate Dean (Research Training) Director of the ARC Centre in Cognitive Computing for Medical Technologies School of Computing and Information Systems The University of Melbourne Victoria 3010, Australia Office:  Room 3.11, Level 3, Doug McDonell Building Tel:  +61 3 8344 1363 Email:  Twitter:  @eltimster

Major Projects

Present

• Whopping Volta GPU Cluster (ARC LIEF Project, 2020)
• Fairness in Natural Language Processing (ARC Discovery Project, 2020—2022)
• Making Computers Understand Common Language about Place (ARC Discovery Project, 2017–2019)
• User-Adaptive Search and Evaluation for Complex Information-Seeking Tasks (ARC Linkage Project, 2016–2019)
• ARC Centre in Cognitive Computing for Medical Technologies (ARC ITRP, 2018–2023)
• Biochemical text mining for advancing chemical and pharmaceutical knowledge (ARC Linkage Project, 2018—2021)

Past

• Personalised Topic Modelling and Sentiment Analysis for Enhanced Information Discovery over Document Streams (ARC Linkage Project, 2013–2017)
• VetCompass: Big Data and Real-time Surveillance for Veterinary Science (ARC LIEF Project, 2016)
• Information access through web-scale question-answer pair finding, ranking and matching (ARC Future Fellowship, 2013—2016)
• Talking about Place — Tapping Human Knowledge to Enrich National Spatial Data Sets (ARC Linkage Project, 2011–2014)
• Principles, Practice, and Pragmatics of Measurement in Experimental Computer Science (ARC Discovery Project, 2011–2014)
• NICTA biomedical text mining (with Verspoor, Cavedon, Zobel, Moffat et al.)
• OLE (ARC Discovery Project, with Bird: Online Linguistic Exploration: Deeper, Faster, Broader Language Documentation, 2009–2011)
• Kubadji (ARC Discovery Project, with Zukerman, Sonenberg, Balbo and Bird: Personalised Content Delivery for Assisted Navigation of Information Rich, Physical Environments such as a Museum, 2007–2010)
• Web-scale Language Identification: All Languages Great and Small (Google Research Award, 2008–2009)
• Multilingual Unsupervised Parse Selection (Microsoft Research Asia Research Award, 2009–2010)
• Web User Forum Text Analysis (Microsoft Research Asia Research Award, 2008–2009)
• Information Delivery from Segmented Textual Data Streams (ARC Discovery Project: 2006–2008)
• Scalable Language Understanding for Japanese (joint research project with NTT Communication Science Labs., 2006–2008)
• Interactive Information Discovery and Delivery (NICTA project, with Cavedon, Stokes, Bird, Moffat, et al., 2005–2007)
• An Intelligent Search Infrastructure for Language Resources on the Web (ARC e-Research Special Research Initiative, with Bird and Hughes, 2006)
• Feature-rich Word Sense Disambiguation and Unknown Word Bootstrapping (joint research project with NTT Communication Science Labs., 2004–2006)

Publications

See my publications page for a reasonably up-to-date list of my papers (with links to most papers). My Google Scholar profile and Semantic Scholar profile are also a reasonably accurate snapshot of my publication output.

Talks

Slides from recent(ish) talks:

• Language and the Shifting Sands of Domain, Space and Time, Invited Talk at the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, Santa Fe, USA.
• Democratic Regression, Stanford University NLP Golden Hour talk, Stanford, USA.
• Robust, Unbiased Natural Language Processing, Keynote Talk at the The Third Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP, Melbourne, Australia.
• Language Identification in the Wild, Guest Talk at the First Workshop on Multi-Language Processing in a Globalising World, Dublin, Ireland.
• Learning to Label Documents, Invited Talk at the ICML 2017 Workshop on Learning to Generate Natural Language, Sydney, Australia.
• VetCompass: Clinical Natural Language Processing for Animal Health, Invited Talk at the 2016 Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop, Osaka, Japan.
• Multiword Expressions at the Grammar--Lexicon Interface, Invited Talk at the COLING 2016 Workshop: Grammar and lexicon: interactions and interfaces, Osaka, Japan.
• Multiword Expressions: From Theory to Practicum, Invited Talk at the ICGL 2015 Workshop: Modern Greek MWE 2015, Berlin, Germany.
• Text Mining of Social Media: Going beyond the Text and Only the Text, Invited Talk at the ACL 2015 Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT), Beijing, China.
• Composed, Distributed Reflections on Semantics and Statistical Machine Translation, Invited talk at the Eighth Workshop on Syntax, Semantics and Structure in Statistical Translation (SSST-8 2014).
• Semantic Analysis of Social Media, Keynote talk at the Third Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2014).

Resources

Online systems

• Twitter user geolocator: predict the location of a Twitter user based on the text of their recent posts, and their user profile [developed in collaboration with Bo Han and Paul Cook]
• FOKS: an intelligent dictionary interface for Japanese, intended to help learners of Japanese look up unknown words without having to dust off their kanji dictionary [developed in collaboration with Lars Yencken and Slaven Bilac]
• Kanji Tester: an adaptive Japanese learning environment, specifically targeted at those swatting for the JLPT 3 and 4 exams [developed in collaboration with Lars Yencken]
• SimSearch: a visual kanji search interface, based on similarity with known kanji [developed in collaboration with Lars Yencken]

Software

• pigeo: an automatic geotagging tool, based on text- and graph-based methods [developed in collaboration with Afshin Rahimi and Trevor Cohn]
• LexSemTM: code for training topic models to estimate word sense distributions at scale [developed in collaboration with Andrew Bennett, Jey Han Lau, Francis Bond and Diana McCarthy]
• polyglot: a language identification toolkit for multilingual documents [developed in collaboration with Marco Lui and Jey Han Lau]
• Toolkit for evaluating topic coherence and topic model quality: toolkit for evaluating the semantic coherence of individual topics and overall topic models, as described in our EACL 2014 paper [developed in collaboration with Jey Han Lau and Dave Newman]
• Twitter user geolocator: trained models and full code to replicate the Twitter user geolocation experiments published in our ACL 2013 demo paper [developed in collaboration with Bo Han and Paul Cook]
• HDP-based word sense induction system: toolkit for inducing word senses based on a Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP) [developed in collaboration with Jey Han Lau and Paul Cook]
• On-line Topic Modeller: implementation of an on-line topic modeller for trend analysis [developed in collaboration with Jey Han Lau]
• langid.py: fast, accurate standalone language identification toolkit; also versions of the pre-trained identifier in C and Javascript [developed in collaboration with Marco Lui]
• SiteScraper: automatically scrapes data from websites based on a handful of sample URLs and strings of interest [developed in collaboration with Richard Penman and David Martinez]
• Hydrat: Python library for text categorisation/language identification [developed in collaboration with Marco Lui]
• Malay tokeniser/lemmatiser: lex/perl tools for tokenising and lemmatising Malay text

Datasets

• Pre-trained doc2vec models for English (described in Lau and Baldwin, 2016)
• LexSemTM (largely) all-vocabulary trained topic models for English (described in Bennett et al., to appear)
• CQADupStack dataset of duplicate questions from StackExchange (described in Hoogeveen et al., 2015)
• Financial agreement named entity dataset (described in Salinas et al., 2015)
• City label set for user geolocation (described in Han et al., 2014; with thanks to Mark Dredze)
• W-NUT 2015 Shared Task on Lexical Normalisation for English Tweets (described in Baldwin et al., 2015)
• Locative Expressions in Social Media Text dataset (described in Liu et al., 2014)
• Novel sense dataset (described in Cook et al., 2014)
• Twitter and Web lexical sample sense annotations (described in Gella et al., 2014)
• Twituser language identification dataset (described in Lui and Baldwin, 2014)
• Topics annotated for observed coherence (described in Lau et al., 2014)
• Multilingual language identification dataset (described in Lui et al., 2014)
• Lexical normalisation dictionary (described in Han et al., 2012)
• Japanese SemCor (described in Bond et al., 2012)
• Multi-domain language identification dataset (from Lui and Baldwin, 2011)
• Topic label dataset (described in Lau et al., 2011)
• Lexical normalisation dataset (described in Han and Baldwin, 2011, incorporating corrections from Jacob Eisenstein); (old version: v1.1)
• Multilingual language identification dataset (as used in the ALTA-2010 Shared Task, and described in Baldwin and Lui, 2010)
• Web user forum thread and post structure dataset (described in Kim et al., 2010 and Wang et al., 2010)
• Topic coherence topics and human judgements (described in Newman et al., 2012)
• Language identification dataset (described in Baldwin and Lui, 2010)
• Case and punctuation restoration dataset (described in Baldwin and Joseph, 2009)
• Satire document collection (described in Burfoot and Baldwin, 2009)
• Tagalog predicate-argument parsing dataset (described in Mistica and Baldwin, 2009)
• Pooled kanji similarity dataset (described in Yencken and Baldwin, 2008)
• Noun-noun compound semantic relations (described in Kim and Baldwin, 2008)
• Compound nominalisation interpretation (described in Nicholson and Baldwin, 2008)
• Deep lexical acquisition of English verb-particle constructions (described in Baldwin, 2008)
• Parsing and WSD dataset (described in Agirre et al., 2008) — email me for access details
• Kanji similarity dataset (described in Yencken and Baldwin, 2006)
• Japanese grapheme-phoneme alignment data (described in Baldwin and Tanaka, 1999)

Miscellaneous

• Multiword expressions (companion page associated with Handbook of NLP chapter)

Teaching

Present

• COMP10001 Foundations of Computing (Semester 1, 2020; co-lectured with Nic Geard and Marion Zalk)

Past

• COMP30027 Machine Learning (Semester 1, 2017 and 2019; co-lectured with Karin Verspoor, Afshin Rahimi, and Jeremy Nicholson)
• Lecture series on Social Media and Text Analytics presented as part of the International Summer School on Web Science and Technology (2016)
• Series of guest lectures on Text Analysis of Social Media presented as part of Language Technology II (Saarland University, August, 2014)
• COMP10001 Foundations of Computing (Semester 1, 2012—2019; co-lectured with Andrew Turpin, Egemen Tanin, Nic Geard, and Marion Zalk)
• COMP90051 Statistical and Evolutionary Learning (Semester 2, 2011; co-lectured with Michael Kirley)
• COMP30018 Knowledge Technologies (2010—2012)
• INFO10001 Informatics 1 (2008—2011)
• Empirical Approaches to Multilingual Lexical Acquisition (Saarland University, Winter, 2008; taught as part of the Erasmus Mundus LCT Masters program)
• 433-352 Data on the Web (2006—2009)
• 433-484/684 Machine Learning (2006— 2008)
• ESSLLI 2006 course on Data-Driven Methods for Acquiring Linguistic Information (with Aline Villavicencio, Anna Korhonen and Valia Kordoni)
• Lexical semantics course convener and co-lecturer for ACL/HCSNet Advanced Program in Natural Language Processing (2006)
• 433-253 Algorithms and Data Structures (2006—2007; co-lectured with Linda Stern)
• 433-395 Advanced Topic in Computer Science (2005)
• 433-680 Machine Learning (2005)
• An Introduction to Computational Word Learning (Stanford University, Fall Quarter, 2003)

Staff

Present

• Victor Fedyashov (Research Fellow 2019—)
• Meladel Mistica (Research Fellow 2019—)
• Simon Šuster (Research Fellow 2020—)

Past

• Afshin Rahimi (Research Fellow 2018—2019)
• Bahar Salehi (Research Fellow 2017—2019)
• Julian Brooke (McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow 2015—2017)
• Andrew Bennett (Research Associate 2016—2017)
• Huizhi Liang (Research Fellow 2014—2016)
• Joel Nothman (Research Fellow 2015—2016)
• Angelos Molfetas (Research Fellow 2014)
• Yvette Graham (Research Fellow 2012—2014)
• Paul Cook (McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow 2011—2014)
• Jey Han Lau (Research Fellow 2013)
• Rebecca Dridan (Research Fellow working on OLE 2009—2011)
• Gintarė Grigonytė (Visiting Research Fellow 2011)
• Su Nam Kim (Research Fellow working on LangID and ILIAD 2009—2010)
• Patrick Ye (Research Fellow working on Kubadji 2009—2010)
• David Martinez (Research Fellow working on ILIAD 2007—2009)
• Marco Lui (Research Assistant working on ILIAD and LangID 2009—2010)
• Richard Penman (Research Assistant working on ILIAD 2008—2009)
• Shlomo Berkovsky (Research Fellow 2007—2008)
• Kapil Gupta (Research Fellow 2009)

Students

Present

• Gaurav Arora (MSc(CS) student; co-supervised with Afshin Rahimi)
• Shraey Bhatia (PhD student; co-supervised with Jey Han Lau)
• Biaoyan Fang (PhD student; co-supervised with Karin Verspoor)
• Brian Hur (PhD student; co-supervised with James Gilkerson, Laura Hardefeldt, and Karin Verspoor)
• Anirudh Joshi (PhD student; co-supervised with Richard Sinnott and Cecile Paris)
• Fajri Koto (PhD student; co-supervised with Jey Han Lau)
• Haonan Li (PhD student; co-supervised with Martin Tomko and Maria Vasardani)
• Yitong Li (PhD student; co-supervised with Trevor Cohn)
• Fei Liu (PhD student; co-supervised with Trevor Cohn)
• Nitika Mathur (PhD student; co-supervised with Trevor Cohn)
• Yulia Otmakhova (PhD student; co-supervised with Karin Verspoor and Jey Han Lau)
• Saumya Pandey (MSc(CS) student; co-supervised with Lea Frermann)
• Aili Shen (PhD student; co-supervised with Jianzhong Qi and Bahar Salehi)
• Shivashankar Subramanian (PhD student; co-supervised with Trevor Cohn)
• Haowen Tang (MSc(CS) student)
• Fan Ye (MSc(CS) student; co-supervised with Afshin Rahimi)
• Shuanglong You (MSc(CS) student; co-supervised with Victor Fedyashov)
• Takashi Wada (PhD student; co-supervised with Jey Han Lau)
• Yuxia Wang (PhD student; co-supervised with Karin Verspoor)

Past

• Adel Foda (PhD student; co-supervised with Jey Han Lau)
• Tatsuya Aoki (visiting PhD student from Tokyo Institute of Technology)
• Leo Bouillet (MSc(CS) student)
• Jun Wang (MSc(CS) student; co-supervised with Graeme Gange)
• Karen Qu (MIT student; co-supervised with Afshin Rahimi)
• Ekaterina Vylomova (PhD student; co-supervised with Trevor Cohn)
• Navnita Nandakumar (MSc(CS) student; co-supervised with Bahar Salehi)
• Qianji Di (MIT student; co-supervised with Ekaterina Vylomova)
• Jinxiang Wang (MSc(CS) student)
• Doris Hoogeveen (PhD student; co-supervised with Karin Verspoor)
• Afshin Rahimi (PhD student; co-supervised with Trevor Cohn)
• Ned Letcher (PhD student; co-supervised with Emily Bender)
• Jingyuan Zhang (MIT student)
• Jim Breen (PhD student; co-supervised with Francis Bond)
• Steven Xu (MSc(CS) student; co-supervised with Jey Han Lau)
• Katharine Cheng (MSc(CS) student; co-supervised with Karin Verspoor)
• Richard Fothergill (PhD student — currently working at rome2rio)
• Viet Nguyen (MSc(CS) student; co-supervised with Julian Brooke)
• Shraey Bhatia (MSc(CS) student; co-supervised with Jey Han Lau — currently a PhD student at The University of Melbourne)
• King Chan (completed PGDip studies in 2017; co-supervised with Julian Brooke)
• Ionut-Teodor Sorodoc (visiting Masters student in 2016; co-supervised with Jey Han Lau)
• Bahar Salehi (completed PhD 2016; co-supervised with Paul Cook — currently working at Go1)
• Andrew Bennett (completed MSc(CS) 2016; co-supervised with Jey Han Lau, Francis Bond, Diana McCarthy and Paul Cook — currently a PhD student at Cornell University)
• Liang Han (completed MIT 2016)
• Michael Niemann (completed PhD 2015; co-supervised with Henry Linger — currently working at Monash University)
• Julio Salinas (completed MIT 2015; co-supervised with Karin Verspoor)
• Marco Lui (completed PhD 2015 — currently working at rome2rio)
• Li Wang (completed PhD 2015; co-supervised with Su Nam Kim — currently working at Dropbox)
• Nitika Mathur (completed MSc(CS) 2014; co-supervised with Yvette Graham)
• Bo Han (completed PhD 2014; co-supervised with Paul Cook)
• Xiwei Wang (completed MSc(CS) 2014; co-supervised with Yvette Graham — currently working at Alibaba)
• Andrew Chester (completed MSc(CS) 2014; co-supervised with Tony Wirth)
• Jared Willett (completed MSc(CS) 2012; co-supervised with David Martinez and Angus Webb)
• Siming Wang (completed PGDip 2013; co-supervised with Alistair Moffat)
• Meladel Mistica (completed PhD 2013; external supervisor — currently working at The University of Melbourne)
• Spandana Gella (completed MSc(CS) 2013; co-supervised with Paul Cook — currently working at Amazon)
• Jey Han Lau (completed PhD 2013; co-supervised with Dave Newman — currently working at The University of Melbourne)
• Clint Burford (completed PhD 2013; co-supervised with Steven Bird — currently working at Apple)
• Willy Yap (completed PhD 2013; co-supervised with Tara McIntosh — currently working at Sportsbet)
• Luke Parkinson (MSc(CS); co-supervised with Paul Cook)
• Matěj Korvas (completed MSc(CS) 2012)
• Igor Tytyk (completed MSc(CS) 2012 — currently working at Grammarly)
• Andrew MacKinlay (completed PhD 2012 — currently working at culture amp)
• Karl Grieser (completed PhD 2012 — currently working at Redbubbble)
• Ned Letcher (completed BSc(Hons) 2010)
• Lars Yencken (completed PhD 2010)
• Marco Lui (completed BCS(Hons) 2009 — currently working at Rome2rio)
• Ben White (completed MIT 2009)
• Li Wang (completed MIT 2009)
• Patrick Ye (completed PhD 2009 — currently working at Amazon)
• Lejoe Kuriakose (completed MEDC 2008)
• Paul Joseph (completed MSSE 2008)
• Su Nam Kim (completed PhD 2008)
• Michael Yang (completed BCS(Hons) 2007)
• Sumukh Ghodke(completed MSSE 2007)
• Phil Blunsom (completed PhD 2007 — currently working at Oxford University/Google DeepMind)
• Edward Ivanovic (completed MPhil 2007)
• Aidan Furlan (completed BCS(Hons) 2006)
• Karl Grieser (completed BSc(Hons) 2006)
• Rebecca Dridan (completed MPhil 2006)
• Jeremy Nicholson (completed BCS(Hons) 2005 — currently working at UniMelb)

Interested in pursuing natural language processing research at The University of Melbourne? Contact me directly, making sure to include a CV and description of your research interests.

UniMelb Administration

Present

• Associate Dean (Research Training) (2017—)
• CIS Education Committee (2008—)
• Higher Degree Research Committee (2018—)

Past

• Chair of the East Asia Regional Study Group (2016—2017)
• Member of Arts Faculty Board (2015)
• Deputy Head of Department (2011—2012)
• Teaching Committee chair (2010—2012)
• School of Engineering Education Committee (2010—2012)
• CIS Faculty of Science liaison (Science APC/PGPC: 2005—2011)
• CSSE Research Committee (2008—2011)
• CSSE Postgraduate Coursework Programmes Committee chair (2007-2009)
• School of Engineering IT Advisory Group (2009)
• Honours/PGDip Coordinator (2005-2007)
• Publications Liaison (2005-2007)
• Member of Science Tools working group, Faculty of Science (2007)

Professional Activities

Present

• Vice President Elect, Association for Computational Linguistics (2020)
• Programme co-chair of The 6th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT)
• Permanent Member of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (2014—)
• Advisory Board for ACL SIGLEX (Special Interest Group on the Lexicon) (2014—)
• Advisory Board for ACL SIGDAT (Special Interest Group for linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP) (2014—)
• Associate Editor for AI Access books (2013—)
• Editorial board of Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2015—)
• Tutorial Chair for AACL-IJCNLP 2020
• Programme Committee Chair for COLING 2022

Past (highlights)

• Programme co-chair of The 5th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT)
• Tutorial Chair for EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019
• Honorary Member of the Australian Computer Society (2015—2018)
• Workshop Chair for COLING 2018
• Local Chair for ACL 2018
• Co-organiser of SemEval 2017 Task 3: Community Question Answering
• Programme co-chair of The 3rd Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT)
• Programme co-chair of The 2nd Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT)
• Programme co-chair of EMNLP 2015 workshop on Linking Models of Lexical, Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics
• Programme co-chair of CIKM 2015 workshop on Topic Models: Post-Processing and Applications
• Workshop Chair for COLING 2014
• Australasian Language Technology Association President (2011—2012) and Secretary (2013—2014)
• Information Officer for ACL SIGLEX (Special Interest Group on the Lexicon) (2010—2013)
• Programme co-chair for EMNLP 2013
• Programme co-chair for *SEM 2013
• Guest editor of Special Issue of Linguistic Issues in Language Technology on the Interaction between Linguistics and Computational Linguistics
• Guest editor of the Special Issue of Computational Linguistics on Prepositions in Applications
• Co-chair of the EACL 2009 Workshop on the Interaction between Linguistics and Computational Linguistics: Virtuous, Vicious or Vacuous?
• Editorial board of Computational Linguistics (2006—2008)
• Workshop Chair for IJCNLP 2008
• Local Chair for PACLING 2007
• Programme Chair for the ACL 2007 Workshop on Deep Linguistic Processing
• Co-organiser of the Inaugural Workshop on Computational Japanese Studies
• Lexical semantics Theme Convener for ACL/HCSNet Advanced Program in Natural Language Processing
• Publicity Chair for COLING/ACL 2006
• Programme Chair for Frontiers in Linguistically Annotated Corpora 2006
• Programme Chair for the Third ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions (at EACL 2006)
• Programme Chair for the Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2005
• Programme Chair for the ACL-SIGLEX Workshop on Deep Lexical Acquisition (at ACL 2005)

Random Miscellania

In the news:

• And the Winner Is ... ACL 2020 Announces Best Paper Awards, Slator (9/7/2020)
• This AI Poet Mastered Rhythm, Rhyme, and Natural Language to Write Like Shakespeare, IEEE Spectrum (30/4/2020)
• The Australian: Engineering & Computer Science Australia’s Research Field Leaders (10/6/2019)
• Australian Financial Review: IBM to build $10 million AI centre with Melbourne Uni (10/6/2019)
• New Scientist News, The Times, Daily Mail, Digital Trends, NVIDIA, InfoSurHoy, la Repubblica, BBC Radio 4: Deep-speare — A joint neural model of poetic language, meter and rhyme (7/2018)
• ABC News: Can we Replace Red Symons with a Robot? (3/10/2017)
• Crikey: How can You Tell if a Tweet is Credible? (6/3/2017)
• Farrago: The Revolution Will Be Computerised (29/8/2016)
• Tech Exec: The Fourth Revolution: Artificial Intelligence (29/1/2016)
• MIT Technology Review: King – Man + Woman = Queen: The Marvelous Mathematics of Computational Linguistics (17/9/2015)
• NCI News: Real-time Twitter Mining (30/9/2014)
• The Age: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence (23/1/2014)
• Oregonian: Tweet Talk (24/6/2011)
• Sydney Morning Herald: Big Brains Coming back to Melbourne (6/12/2005)
• UniNews: Reversing the Brain Drain (14/11/2005)

In a moment of weakness, I signed up for LinkedIn.

For the trivia lovers, here is my (almost certainly outdated) full CV.