This photo is from 2007, of me and my daughter. We appear to be looking at you suspiciously, but don't be deterred.
CONTACT DETAILS
| addr: |
Department of Computing
Macquarie University North Ryde NSW 2109 Australia |
| email: | mark.dras AT mq . edu . au |
| phone: | +61 2 9850 9580 |
| fax: | +61 2 9850 9551 |
| room: | building E6A, room 380 |
Workwise, I'm an associate professor in the Department of Computing of Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia. Before that, I spent two years at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Research in Cognitive Science.
RESEARCH
I work in language technology and computational linguistics, and am a member of Macquarie's Centre for Language Technology and its Centre for Language Sciences.
In general terms, the theme of my research is language structure and transformation. I'm interested in the ways that natural languages and their mathematical or formal representations can be transformed, the contexts in which these transformations occur, the situations where it's better to use one kind of representation or another, and the structural representations that are suitable for "ill-formed" text. Specifically, I work on natural language generation, native language identification (the process of identifying the native language of someone writing in a second language, through characteristic errors or distributional properties of the text), machine translation, and related areas. I'm also interested in sentiment analysis, and how sentiment affects language choices. For more detail, there is:
- a description of the particular projects I'm working on;
- a list of publications;
- a list of my competitive grants;
- a list of my students.
TEACHING
In semester 1, 2013, I'll be teaching on
I've taught a range of units over the years. I also think it's useful for students to know something about what their teachers are likely to be like. As one source of information, there's the sporadic appearance of the Alternative Calendar, but computing units are hardly ever mentioned there, and it usually sounds as if there's only ever a couple of (disgruntled) respondants. So, in case you're thinking of taking a class with me, here's a link to evaluations for several of my units.
OTHER
Some other things.