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Diego Mollá Aliod

Summer Vacation Projects

Every Australian summer (January/February) the Department of Computing offers a number of vacation scholarships to current students of the Department undergraduate degrees. Typically the scholarships cover about 6 weeks of full time work in a specific project. This is an excellent opportunity to gain working experience, or to test your research abilities if you are considering doing Honours or a PhD.

Many of the Honours/Masters projects listed above can be adapted to Vacation scholarships. In addition you could try one of these:

Open Source for AnswerFinder

Currently AnswerFinder, our question answering system, uses proprietary code developed by third parties. The goal of this project is to replace the proprietary code with open-source code. This will involve adapting the interfaces of AnswerFinder to the proprietary modules so that they can handle the new modules. This project is ideal for people with strong programming skills and interest in working for an established software project.

Required background: Good programming skills in Python or C++.
Desired background: Experience with medium to large software projects.

Building a Web Service

The goal of this project is to convert AnswerFinder, our question answering system, into a Web Service. The details of how this could be done are available in:

Required background: Good programming skills in C++; experience with web technology (e.g. Pass grade in COMP249).
Desired background: Experience with XML programming; experience with Web Services.

A framework to Test Syntactic Patterns

A Masters student has developed a set of question-answering patterns as part of her project. The task of this project is to build a system that tests these patterns on a collection of questions and answer candidates.

Required background: Good programming skills, preferably in C++.
Desired background: Pass grade in SLP148, COMP248, or COMP348.

Question classification

AnswerFinder currently uses a very simple method to classify questions. The task of this project is to expand the current method by introducing patterns based on syntactic information and/or machine learning techniques.

Required background: Good programming skills, preferably in C++; Pass grade in SLP148, COMP248, or COMP348.
Desired background: Experience in programming in a group.