Provost and Professor of Natural Language Processing Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence Melbourne Laureate Professor School of Computing and Information Systems The University of Melbourne Email:  Twitter:  @eltimster

Major Projects

Present

• AI for Legal Problem Diagnosis in the Diverse Language of Australians (ARC Linkage Project, 2023—2026)

Past

• Fairness in Natural Language Processing (ARC Discovery Project, 2020—2023)
• 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—2022)
• Whopping Volta GPU Cluster (ARC LIEF Project, 2020)
• 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)
• 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:

• The Long and Winding Road of NLP: Reflections on the Last 30 Years, Invited Talk at The 30th Anniversary Symposium of the Association for Natural Language Processing Japan, Tokyo, Japan.

Resources

Old Software (not updated since 2016; more recent repositories are linked from associated papers)

• 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

Old Models/Datasets (up until 2016; see more recent work, see the associated paper(s) for links)

• 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., 2017)
• 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

Past

• COMP10001 Foundations of Computing (Semester 1, 2012—2021; variously co-lectured with Andrew Turpin, Egemen Tanin, Nic Geard, and Marion Zalk)
• Lecture series on User Generated Content presented as part of the first Advanced Language Processing School (ALPS) (2021)
• 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)
• 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

• Xudong Han (Research Fellow 2023—, MBZUAI)
• Masahiro Kaneko (Research Fellow 2023—, MBZUAI)
• Tatsuki Kuribayashi (Research Fellow 2023—, MBZUAI)
• Kemal Kurniawan (Research Fellow 2023—, The University of Melbourne)
• Haonan Li (Research Fellow 2022—, MBZUAI)
• Artem Shelmanov (Research Fellow 2022—, MBZUAI)

Past

• Zeerak Talat (Research Fellow 2023—2024, MBZUAI)
• Fajri Koto (Research Fellow 2022—2024, MBZUAI)
• Simon Šuster (Research Fellow 2020—2024, The University of Melbourne)
• Biaoyan Fang (Research Fellow 2022—2023)
• Victor Fedyashov (Research Fellow 2019—2022)
• Aili Shen (Research Fellow 2020—2022)
• Meladel Mistica (Research Fellow 2019—2021)
• Shivashankar Subramanian (Research Fellow 2020—2021)
• 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

• Sayantan Dasgupta (PhD student at The University of Melbourne; co-supervised with Trevor Cohn)
• Junjie Gao (MSc student at MBZUAI)
• Go Inoue (PhD student at MBZUAI; co-supervised with Nizar Habash)
• Anirudh Joshi (PhD student at The University of Melbourne; co-supervised with Richard Sinnott and Cecile Paris)
• Mark Summerfield (PhD student at The University of Melbourne; co-supervised with Andrew Christie)
• Hung Thinh Truong (PhD student at The University of Melbourne; co-supervised with Karin Verspoor and Trevor Cohn)
• Gisela Vallejo (PhD student at The University of Melbourne; co-supervised with Lea Frermann)
• Dalin Wang (PhD student at The University of Melbourne; co-supervised with Ed Hovy)
• Renxi Wang (MSc student at MBZUAI)
• Rui Xing (PhD student at The University of Melbourne; co-supervised with Jey Han Lau)
• Jinrui Yang (PhD student at The University of Melbourne; co-supervised with Trevor Cohn)
• Xiyuan (Emma) Zhang (PhD student at The University of Melbourne; co-supervised with Noel Faux and Ben Goudey)

Past

• Yichen Huang (MSc student at MBZUAI)
• Qisheng Liao (MSc student at MBZUAI)
• Shraey Bhatia (PhD student at The University of Melbourne; co-supervised with Jey Han Lau)
• Takashi Wada (PhD student at The University of Melbourne; co-supervised with Jey Han Lau)
• Yulia Otmakhova (PhD student at The University of Melbourne; co-supervised with Karin Verspoor and Jey Han Lau)
• Xudong Han (PhD student; co-supervised with Trevor Cohn)
• Yuxia Wang (PhD student; co-supervised with Karin Verspoor)
• Haonan Li (PhD student; co-supervised with Martin Tomko and Maria Vasardani)
• Fajri Koto (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)
• Yingrui Zhang (MDSc student; co-supervised with Victor Fedyashov and Ben Goudey)
• Andrew Shen (undergrad student; co-supervised with Jey Han Lau and Fajri Koto)
• Nitika Mathur (PhD student; co-supervised with Trevor Cohn)
• Qinyu Bai (MDSc student; co-supervised with Victor Fedyashov and Ben Goudey)
• Siyang Wang (MSc(CS) student; co-supervised with Simon Šuster)
• Chenbang Huang (MSc(CS) student; co-supervised with Aili Shen)
• Qian Sun (MSc(CS) student; co-supervised with Aili Shen)
• Wayan Oger Vihikan (MIT student; co-supervised with Meladel Mistica)
• Fan Ye (MSc(CS) student; co-supervised with Simon Šuster)
• Shuanglong You (MSc(CS) student; co-supervised with Victor Fedyashov)
• Aili Shen (PhD student; co-supervised with Jianzhong Qi and Bahar Salehi)
• Shivashankar Subramanian (PhD student; co-supervised with Trevor Cohn)
• Saumya Pandey (MSc(CS) student; co-supervised with Lea Frermann)
• Haowen Tang (MSc(CS) student)
• Gaurav Arora (MSc(CS) student; co-supervised with Afshin Rahimi)
• Yitong Li (PhD student; co-supervised with Trevor Cohn)
• Fei Liu (PhD student; co-supervised with Trevor Cohn)
• 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 Redbubble)
• 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/Cohere AI)
• 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)

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.

Professional Activities

Present

• 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—)
• Editorial board of Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2015—) and ACL Rolling Review (2021—)

Past (highlights)

• President, Association for Computational Linguistics (2022)
• General Chair of the 10th CCF International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLPCC2021)
• Tutorial Chair for AACL-IJCNLP 2020
• Programme co-chair of The 6th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT)
• 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 media (up until 2021; not updated since moving to MBZUAI):

• Ingenium: Building fairness into AI from the ground-up (12/8/2021)
• TOPBOTS: GPT-3 & Beyond: 10 NLP Research Papers You Should Read (17/11/2020)
• The Australian: Engineering & Computer Science Australia’s Research Field Leaders (23/9/2020)
• ABC News: Donald Trump, QAnon and the limit of Twitter's crackdown on conspiracies (2/9/2020)
• Slator: And the Winner Is ... ACL 2020 Announces Best Paper Awards, (9/7/2020)
• IEEE Spectrum This AI Poet Mastered Rhythm, Rhyme, and Natural Language to Write Like Shakespeare, (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.