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Diego Mollá Aliod Email: diego.molla-aliod at mq.edu.au Address: Macquarie University Division of Information and Communication Sciences Computing Department Sydney NSW 2109 Australia Tel: +61-(0)2-9850-9531 Fax: +61-(0)2-9850-9551

Hi, welcome to my home page. My full name is Diego Mollá Aliod, where my family name is the double word Mollá Aliod. It is like a hyphenated surname, but without a hyphen!

Current Status

I am a senior lecturer at the Department of Computing, Macquarie University.

• Teaching responsibilities (2014, Semester 2):
• ITEC830 - XML Technologies
• Administration Responsibilities (2014, Semester 2):
• Exemptions officer
• Executive member of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA)
• Advisory board member of BioASQ
• Research Projects:
  • NLP for Evidence Based Medicine
  • AnswerFinder
  • List of PhD, Honours, Masters and Summer Vacation projects
• Units I've taught in the recent past:
  • COMP123: 2001H2, 2002H1
  • COMP125: 2004H2, 2005H1, 2006H1, 2007H1, 2008H1, 2009H1, 2010H1, 2012H2, 2013H1
  • COMP248: 2000H2, 2001H2, 2002H2, 2003H2, 2006H2, 2008H2
  • COMP249: 2004H1, 2011H1
  • COMP348: 2001H1, 2002H1, 2003H1, 2007H1, 2007H2, 2008H1, 2009H1, 2010H1, 2013H1, 2014H1
  • COMP448: 2005H1, 2006H1, 2008H1, 2009H1, 2010H2
  • COMP453: 2002H2, 2003H2, 2004H2
  • COMP401/901: 2010H2, 2011H1, 2012H1
  • ITEC830: 2006H2, 2010H2, 2012H2
  • ITEC831: 2012H1
  • ITEC833: 2011H1
  • ITEC872: 2011H2
  • ITEC902: 2012H2
  • SLP148: 2003H1, 2004H1, 2005H1, 2006H1, 2007H2, 2008H2
• Past recent administration responsibilities:
• MRes advisor: 2014H1
• Honours convenor: 2010H2 - 2012H2
• Exemptions officer: 2009H1 - present
• Secretary of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA): 2003 - 2008
• President of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA): 2009 - 2010
• Executive member of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA): 2011 - present

Research Interests

My general research interests lie in the intersection between linguistics and computer science. Of special interest is the understanding of human languages and how this understanding can be used in practical computer applications.

Here's the tag cloud of the bibliography I'm keeping in bibsonomy (updated 1 Jul 2011):

• question_answering
• inf_retrieval
• NLP
• molla_publication
• summarisation
• biomedical
• DG
• parsers
• machine_learning
• evaluation
• semantics
• ExtrAns
• web
• inf_extraction
• anaphora
• AnswerFinder
• grammar
• speech
• logic
• answer_extraction
• underspecification
• ambiguity
• AI
• computer
• named_entities
• graphs
• semantic_web
• questions
• WordNet
• folksonomy
• prolog
• robust_parsing
• HPSG
• EBM
• machine_translation
• dependencies
• conceptual_graphs
• ontology
• link_grammar
• annotation
• dialogue_system
• resources
• clinical
• tutoring_system
• constraint_programming
• web_data_extraction
• quantification
• context
• entailment
• word_sense

Current research topics are:

Natural Language Processing of Medical Text

I have recently built a corpus of summaries of clinical inquiries using the material from the Journal of Family Practice. With this corpus I plan to develop techniques to help medical practitioners find and appraise clinical evidence under the paradigm of Evidence Based Medicine.

• Project Page

Answer Extraction and Question Answering

AnswerFinder is a system that uses ExtrAns' technology to perform question answering from larger volumes of text, on the line of the question answering track of TREC.

From Nov. 1995 to end of Oct 1999 I participated in ExtrAns, an answer extraction system, and the extension WebExtrAns. Relevant links are:

• A short description of ExtrAns and relevant papers.
• A short description of WebExtrAns and relevant papers.
• A longer description of ExtrAns, adapted to HTML from a publication in CLIP.
• A demo of ExtrAns (Send me an email if it doesn't work).

PhD Research

My PhD focused on a formal specification of a subset of the aspectual interactions between nouns and verbs. Relevant links are:

• Abstract.
• Source (gzipped PostScript format, 271K).
• References used during the PhD.