Diego Mollá Aliod
Curriculum Vitae
![[Personal photography]](images/diego.jpg) |
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| Research Topics | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Natural Language Processing. Text-based Question Answering. Information Extraction. Text Summarisation. Medical Texts. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
Most Significant Research Contributions
My research contribution is centered on the application of theoretical linguistics to specific real-world problems, in particular to automated text-based question answering. I joined the University of Zurich and became the principal researcher in the ExtrAns and WebExtrAns projects (from 1996 to 2001). Both projects were based on the development of answer extraction systems. Answer extraction systems locate those sentences in the source text that contain the answer posed by the user. The outcome of the project was a working system that handles questions about 500 manpages (a Web demo is available). I was the main contributor to the design of the logical forms and the question-answering method using the logical forms. The success of ExtrAns and WebExtrAns is evident from the fact that the system is widely cited as a pioneering question-answering system, an example of a question answering system of technical domains, and an example of the use of logical forms for question answering.
In Macquarie University I established the AnswerFinder project. AnswerFinder is a question answering system that combines the use of logical information (inspired from ExtrAns and WebExtrAns), state-of-the-art approaches in question answering, and innovative graph-based machine learning methods to find the exact answer to the user question. AnswerFinder has participated in the question answering track of the Text REtrieval conference (TREC), the main international forum for the evaluation of question-answering systems, between 2003 and 2006. AnswerFinder is in fact the only Australian-based question answering system that has participated in the question answering track of TREC.
My current research focuses on the development and application of text-processing technologies that help the medical doctor find and appraise clinical evidence in the vast resources of medical publications.
Teaching
| Years | Organization | Level | Topic |
| 2001-pres | Macquarie University | Undergraduate Lectures | Computing and Language Technology |
| 1995-96 | The University of Edinburgh | Postgraduate Lectures | Logic |
| 1990-91 | Universitat Politècnica de València | Undergraduate Lectures | Theory of Programming |
Courses taught in the last 3 years
| Year | Course Keys |
| 2011 | COMP249, ITEC833, COMP401/901 |
| 2010 | ITEC830, COMP401/901, COMP448, COMP125 |
| 2009 | COMP125, COMP348, COMP448 |
| 2008 | SLP148, COMP125, COMP248, COMP348, COMP448 |
Brief description of the courses:
- COMP125
- Fundamentals of Computer Science, 1st-year undergraduate course, Macquarie University
- COMP248
- Language Technology, 2nd-year undergraduate course, Macquarie University
- COMP249
- Web Technology, 2nd-year undergraduate course, Macquarie University
- COMP348
- Document Processing and the Semantic Web, 3rd-year undergraduate course, Macquarie University
- COMP448
- Advanced Topics in Natural Language Processing, Honours course, Macquarie University
- COMP401/901
- Research Methods and Communication, Honours and Postgraduate unit, Macquarie University
- ITEC830
- XML Technologies, a Masters-by-coursework unit, Macquarie University
- ITEC833
- Web Server Technologies and Web Services, a Masters-by-coursework unit, Macquarie University
- SLP148
- Language, Logic, and Computation, 1st-year undergraduate course, Macquarie University
Doctoral Supervision and Review
I have reviewed four Australian PhD theses.
I have supervised the following PhD students:
- Jean-Philippe Prost: Modelling Syntactic Gradience with Loose Constraint-based Parsing (thesis submitted Jan 2008).
- Luiz A. Sangoi Pizzato: Using Linguistic Motivated Features in Document Retrieval for Question Answering (thesis submitted Dec 2008).
I am supervising the following PhD student:
- Abeed Sarker: Text Summarisation for Evidence-Based Medicine (started in 2010).
Postdoctoral Research Positions |
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| Years | Organization & Department | Location | Job Title |
| 2005-pres | Macquarie University, Computing | Sydney, Australia | Senior Lecturer |
| 2001-2004 | Macquarie University, Computing | Sydney, Australia | Lecturer |
| Founding member of the Centre for Language Technology in the Division of Information and Communication Sciences; research in the extension of ExtrAns (see below) to perform more general question answering over larger volumes of data. | |||
| 2000-01 | University of Zurich, Computational Linguistics | Zurich, Switzerland | Senior Research Assistant |
| Extension of ExtrAns (see below) to WebExtrAns, a help-system over text documents formatted in XML. The test text was the maintenance manual of an Airbus commercial aircraft. | |||
| 1996-99 | University of Zurich, Computational Linguistics | Zurich, Switzerland | Senior Research Assistant |
| Implementation of ExtrAns, a help-system to parse and extract the logical forms of standard UNIX manual pages. The goal of ExtrAns is to parse and build the logical form of the query given by users (in plain English), and then extract those sentences whose logical forms can prove that of the query, from the manual pages. The project is funded by the Swiss National Fund. | |||
Postgraduate Studies |
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| Years | Organization & Department | Location | Course |
| 1992-96 | University of Edinburgh, Linguistics | Edinburgh, UK | PhD in Aspect Composition |
| Dissertation on Aspectual Composition and Sentence Interpretation: A formal approach. | |||
| 1994-95 | Took leave and completed 1 year compulsory social service in Spain. | ||
| 1991-92 | University of Edinburgh, Linguistics | Edinburgh, UK | MSc in Speech and Language Processing |
| Dissertation on Integrating time into Discourse Representation Theory: A computational approach. | |||
| Graduated with Distinction. | |||
| 1990-91 | Universitat Politècnica de València, Computer Science | Valencia, Spain | Research in Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence |
| Automatic pattern recognition and its application to Speech Recognition and Computer Vision. | |||
Undergraduate Studies |
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| Years | Organization | Location | Course |
| 1985-90 | Universitat Politècnica de València | Valencia, Spain | 5-yr degree in Computer Science |
| Dissertation on Inference of k-testable languages | |||
| Graduated with Distinction. | |||
| Awarded with the Third National Prize to the best degree in Computer Science (Tercer Premio Nacional de Terminación de Estudios de Lienciatura en Informática) by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia). | |||
Grants
Note that, unless otherwise specified, all figures are in Australian Dollars.
| Years | Source of Funding | Amount | Chief Investigators |
| 2010 | Macquarie University Research Development Grant (MQRDG) | $35,098 | D. Mollá |
| Generation and Evaluation of Clinical Evidence-based Summaries on Demand | |||
| 2009 | ORISE - National Library of Medicine | USD3,000 + air ticket | D. Mollá |
| Visit to the National Library of Medicine | |||
| 2005 | Macquarie University Safety Net | $19,898 | S. Cassidy, D. Mollá |
| Information Access in Meeting Room Speech Archives | |||
| 2004 | Macquarie University MURDG | $5,200 | D. Mollá, M. Dras | Visit of Dr. Philippe Blache to enhance the development of new techniques for robust parsing and language understanding |
| 2004-06 | ARC Discovery | $290,000 | D. Mollá, R. Dale | A scalable and portable question-answering system |
| 2003-05 | ARC Linkage | $56,000 | D. Richards, D. Mollá, R. Schwitter | Achieving higher availability of storage subsystems through application of a self learning expert system. |
| 2001 | Macquarie University MUNS | $18,000 | D. Mollá | A fast and robust logical form generator using a third-party shallow parser. |
Miscellaneous duties since 2003
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Publications
Journal Articles
- D. Mollá and J. L. Vicedo. Question Answering in Restricted Domains: An Overview (2007). Computational Linguistics, 33(1):41-61.
- D. Mollá. Hacia el Uso de la Información Sintáctica y Semántica en los Sistemas de Búsqueda de Respuestas (2004). Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural, 33:17-24.
- D, Mollá, F. Rinaldi, R. Schwitter, J. Dowdall and M. Hess. ExtrAns: Extracting Answers from Technical Texts (2003). IEEE Intelligent Systems 18(4):12-17.
- D. Mollá, R. Schwitter, M. Hess, and R. Fournier. ExtrAns, an answer extraction system (2000). Traitement Automatique de Langues, 41(2):495-519.
- D. Mollá, G. Schneider, R. Schwitter, and M. Hess. Answer extraction using a dependency grammar in ExtrAns (2000). Traitement Automatique de Langues, 41(1):127-156.
Book Chapters
- D. Mollá and J.L. Vicedo. Question Answering (2010). Chapter 20 of N. Indurkhya and F. J. Damerau (Eds). Handbook of Natural Language Processing, Second Edition. CRC Press, pp485-510, 2010.
- D. Mollá. From Minimal Logical Forms for Answer Extraction to Logical Graphs for Question Answering (2009). Searching Answers: Festschrift in Honour of Michael Hess on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday, Münster:MV-Wissenschaft, pp101-108.
- E. Akhmatova and D. Mollá. Recognizing Textual Entailment via Atomic Propositions (2006). In Machine Learning Challenges, LNCS 3944/2006, Springer, pp385-403.
- F. Rinaldi, M. Hess, J. Dowdall, D. Mollá, and R. Schwitter. Question answering in terminology-rich technical domains (2004). In M. Maybury (ed.) New Directions in Question Answering, pp. 71-82. AAAI Press.
- K. Böttger, R. Schwitter, D. Mollá, and D. Richards. Towards Reconciling Use Cases Via Controlled Language and Graphical Models (2003). In O. Bartenstein, U. Geske, M. Hannebauer, O. Yoshie (eds.), Web-Knowledge Management and Decision Support, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2543, pp. 115-128, Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany.
Conference Papers
- P. Davis-Desmond and D. Mollá. Detection of Evidence in Clinical Research Papers (2012). Proceedings of the ACSW 2012 Australasian Workshop on Health Informatics and Knowledge Management (HIKM 2012), Melbourne, Australia.
- D. Mollá and A. Sarker. Automatic Grading of Evidence: The 2011 ALTA Shared Task (2011). Proceedings of the 2011 Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA 2011), Canberra, Australia.
- A. Sarker, D. Mollá and Cécile Paris. Outcome Polarity Identification of Medical Papers (2011). Proceedings of the 2011 Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA 2011), Canberra, Australia.
- D. Mollá and María Elena Santiago-Martínez. Development of a Corpus for Evidence Medicine Summarisation (2011). Proceedings of the 2011 Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA 2011), Canberra, Australia. [slides]
- A. Sarker, D. Mollá and Cécile Paris. Towards Automatic Grading of Evidence (2011). Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Health Document Text Mining and Information Analysis (LOUHI 2011), pp51-58. Bled, Slovenia.
- A. Sarker and D. Mollá. A Rule-based Approach for Automatic Identification of Publication Types of Medical Papers (2010). Proceedings ADCS 2010, 5 pages. Melbourne.
- D. Mollá. A Corpus for Evidence Based Medicine Summarisation (2010). Proceedings ALTA 2010, pp.76-80. Melbourne.
- A. Tutos and D. Mollá. A Study on the Use of Search Engines for Question Answering in Biomedicine (2010). Australasian Workshop On Health Informatics and Knowledge Management (HIKM), 8 pages. Brisbane.
- L.A. Pizzato and D. Mollá. Indexing on Semantic Roles for Question Answering (2008). Proceedings COLING workshop on Information Retrieval for Question Answering (IR4QA), 8 pages. Manchester.
- D. Mollá, M. van Zaanen and S. Cassidy. Named Entity Recognition in Question Answering of Speech Data (2007). Proceedings ALTA 2007, 57-65, Melbourne. [poster]
- L.A. Pizzato and D. Mollá. Question Prediction Language Model (2007). Proceedings ALTA 2007, 92-99, Melbourne.
- M. van Zaanen and D. Mollá. A Named Entity Recogniser for Question Answering (2007). Proceedings PACLING 2007, 8 pages, Melbourne.
- M. van Zaanen and D. Mollá. AnswerFinder at QA @ CLEF 2007 (2007). Working Notes for the CLEF 2007 Workshop, 9 pages, Budapest.
- D. Mollá, S. Cassidy and M. van Zaanen. AnswerFinder at QAst 2007: Named Entity Recognition for QA on Speech Transcripts (2007). Working Notes for the CLEF 2007 Workshop, 9 pages, Budapest.
- D. Mollá, M. van Zaanen, L. Pizzato. AnswerFinder at TREC 2006. The Fifteenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2006) Proceedings. 8 pages.
- D. Mollá, M. van Zaanen, and D. Smith. Named Entity Recognition for Question Answering (2006). Proceedings ALTW 2006, 8 pages, Sydney.
- L.A. Pizzato, D. Mollá, and C. Paris. Pseudo Relevance Feedback Using Named Entities for Question Answering (2006). Proceedings ALTW 2006, 8 pages, Sydney.
- D. Mollá and S. Wan. Macquarie University at DUC 2006: Question Answering for Summarisation (2006). Proceedings DUC 2006, 62-69 [poster].
- D. Mollá. Learning of Graph-based Question Answering Rules (2006). Proceedings HLT/NAACL 2006 Workshop on Graph Algorithms for Natural Language Processing, 37-44.
- D. Mollá and M. van Zaanen. AnswerFinder at TREC 2005 (2006). The Fourteenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2005), 9 pages.
- D. Mollá and M. van Zaanen. Learning of Graph Rules for Question Answering (2005). Proc. ALTW05, 9 pages, Sydney, December 2005.
- L.A. Pizzato and D. Mollá. Extracting Exact Answers using a Meta Question Answering System (2005). Proc. ALTW05, pp. 105-111, Sydney, December 2005 [poster].
- M. van Zaanen, L.A. Pizzato and D. Mollá. Classifying Sentences Using Induced Structure (2005). Proc. Twelfth Edition of the Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE2005), pp. 139-150, Buenos Aires, November 2005.
- M. van Zaanen, L.A. Pizzato and D. Mollá. Question Classification by Structure Induction (2005) . In Leslie Pack Kaelbling (ed.), Proc. Nineteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI05), poster presentation, Edinburgh, July 2005. ISBN 0-938075-93-4.
- D. Mollá and M. Gardiner. AnswerFinder at TREC 2004 (2005). The Thirteenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2004), http://trec.nist.gov/pubs.html.
- D. Mollá and M. Gardiner. AnswerFinder - Question Answering by Combining Lexical, Syntactic and Semantic Information (2004). Proc. ALTW04, pp. 9-16, Sydney, December 2004.
- D. Mollá. AnswerFinder in TREC 2003 (2004). The Twelth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2003), http://trec.nist.gov/pubs.html.
- D. Mollá. Towards Semantic-Based Overlap Measures for Question Answering (2003). Proc. ALTW03, 8 pages, Melbourne, December 2003.
- F. Rinaldi, J. Dowdall, M. Hess, D. Mollá, R. Schwitter, and K. Kaljurand. Knowledge-Based Question Answering (2003). Proc. KES'2003 -- Seventh International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems, 3-5 September 2003, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2773, pp. 785-792. Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany.
- F. Rinaldi, J. Dowdall, K. Kaljurand, M. Hess, D. Mollá. Exploiting Paraphrases in a Question Answering System (2003). Proc. Workshop in Paraphrasing at ACL2003, pp. 25-32. July 11, Sapporo, Japan.
- D. Mollá, R. Schwitter, F. Rinaldi, J. Dowdall, M. Hess. Anaphora Resolution in ExtrAns (2003). 2003 International Symposium on Reference Resolution and Its Applications to Question Answering and Summarization, June 23-25, Venice, Italy.
- D. Mollá and B. Hutchinson. Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Evaluations of Parsing Systems (2003). Proceedings European Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), workshop on Evaluation Initiatives in Natural Language Processing, pp. 43-50. Budapest, 14 April 2003.
- D. Mollá, R. Schwitter, F. Rinaldi, J. Dowdall, M. Hess. Natural Language Processing for Answer Extraction in Technical Domains (2003). Proceedings European Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), workshop on Natural Language Processing for Question Answering, pp. 5-12. Budapest, 14 April.
- R. Dale, D. Mollá, R. Schwitter. Natural Language Processing in the Undergraduate Curriculum (2003). Proc. Fifth Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE2003), pp. 9-13. Adelaide, Australia.
- D. Mollá and B. Hutchinson. Dependency-based semantic interpretation for answer extraction (2002). Proc. 2002 Australasian NLP Workshop (ANLP'02), pp. 21-32. Canberra.
- R. Dale, D. Mollá, and R. Schwitter. Evangelising Language Technology: A practically-focussed undergraduate program (2002). Proc. ACL 2002 Workshop on Effective Tools and Methodologies for Teaching NLP and Computational Linguistics, pp. 27-32. Philadelphia.
- F. Rinaldi, J. Dowdall, M. Hess, D. Mollá and Rolf Schwitter Towards Answer Extraction: An Application to Technical Domains (2002). In F. van Harmelen (ed.), ECAI 2002, Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, July 21-26. IOS Press, Amsterdam, pp. 460-464.
- F. Rinaldi, M. Hess, D. Mollá, R. Schwitter, J. Dowdall, G. Schneider, and R. Fournier. Answer Extraction in Technical Domains (2002). In A. Gelbukh (ed.), Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, 3rd International Conference CICLing-2002 February 17-23, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, pp. 360-369.
- K. Böttger, R. Schwitter, D. Richards, O. Aguilera, and D. Mollá. Reconciling Use Cases via Controlled Language and Graphical Models (2001). Proc. 14th International Conference of Applications of Prolog (INAP 2001), 10 pages. Tokyo.
- D. Mollá and R. Schwitter. From plain English to controlled English (2001). Proc. 2001 Australasian Natural Language Processing Workshop, 7 pages. Sydney.
- D. Mollá. Towards incremental semantic annotation (2001). Proc. First International Workshop on Multimedia Annotation (MMA-2001), 10 pages. Tokyo.
- D. Mollá. Ontologically promiscuous flat logical forms for NLP (2001). Proc. Fourth International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS-4), pp. 249-265. Tilburg.
- W. Vasconcelos, R. Schwitter, D. Mollá, J. Cavalcanti. Implementing Prolog-Run WWW Sites (2000). Proc. 13th International Conference on Applications of Prolog (INAP2000), pp. 60-65. Waseda University, Tokyo.
- R. Schwitter, D. Mollá, R. Fournier, and M. Hess. Answer extraction: Towards better evaluation of NLP systems (2000). Proc. Workshop on Reading Comprehension Texts, ANLP-NAACL2000. Seattle.
- D. Mollá and M. Hess. Dealing with ambiguities in an answer extraction system (2000). Proc. ATALA Workshop on Representation and Treatment of Ambiguity in Natural Language Processing. Paris.
- R. Schwitter, D. Mollá, and M. Hess. ExtrAns. Answer extraction from technical documents by minimal logical forms and selective highlighting (1999). To appear in Proc. Third International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation, Batumi, Georgia.
- G. Schneider, D. Mollá, and M. Hess. Inkrementelle minimale logische Formen für die Antwortextraction (1999). To appear in Proc. 34th Colloquium of Linguistics, University of Mainz, Germersheim, Germany.
- D. Mollá and M. Hess. On the scalability of the answer extraction system ``ExtrAns'' (1999). Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB'99), Klagenfurt, Austria. 219-224.
- D. Mollá, J. Berri, and M. Hess. A real world implementation of answer extraction (1998). In Proc. of the 9th International Conference and Workshop on Database and Expert Systems. Workshop ``Natural Language and Information Systems'' (NLIS'98), Vienna. 143-148.
- J. Berri, D. Mollá, and M. Hess. Extraction automatique de réponses: implémentation du système ExtrAns (1998). In Proc. of the 5e Conférence Annuelle sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles (TALN 1998), Paris. 12-21.
- D. Mollá. Aspectual composition and our (linguistic) interpretation of the world (1996). Departmental Conference of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh. On-line publication.
- D. Mollá. On the aspectual interactions between verbs and NPs (1996). The 5th Manchester University Postgraduate Linguistics Conference. In Papers in Linguistcs from the University of Manchester, 1(1):129-143, Manchester University.
- D. Mollá. On the influences of noun phrases in the determination of the sentence aspectual class (1994). In Proceedings of the Edinburgh Linguistics Department Conference '94. Department of Linguistics, University of Edinburgh. 126-135.
Other Publications
- D. Mollá and David Martinez (Eds.) Proceedings of the 2011 Australasian Language Technology Workshop (2011), Canberra.
- W. Li and D. Mollá (Eds.) Computer Processing of Oriental Languages: Language Technology for the Knowledge-based Economy (2009). 22nd International Conference, ICCPOL 2009, Hong Kong, March 26-27.
- D. Mollá and J. L. Vicedo (Eds.) Special Section on Question Answering in Restricted Domains (2007). Computational Linguistics, 33(1).
- D. Mollá and J. L. Vicedo (Eds.) Proceedings of the AAAI 2005 Workshop in Question Answering in Restricted Domains (2005).
- D. Mollá and J. L. Vicedo (Eds.). Proceedings of the ACL 2004 Workshop in Question Answering in Restricted Domains (2004).
- S. Geldof and D. Mollá (Eds.) Proceedings 2002 Australasian NLP Workshop (2002), Canberra.
References
Available on request.