Taught Courses

This year (2022-23) I am teaching Interactive System Design (ECS733). See here for my office surgery hours. Materials for this and the other courses I usually teach are available here:

• Neural Networks and Natural Language Processing
• Natural Language Processing
• Interactive System Design

Undergraduate Projects

Some possible ideas for BSc projects in natural language processing (NLP). Probably all involve some programming, but it's up to you which language or how implementation-oriented you want to make it (could be building a robust system using Java, could be using MATLAB/Python/Weka for analysis):

• More analysis-oriented:
• Sentiment/emotion detection (maybe for a non-English language e.g. Turkish, Farsi, Japanese?)
• Sarcasm or bullshit detection
• Named entity (person/location/organisation etc) detection (for Twitter?)
• Diagnosing mental health conditions from language
• Building an automatic dictionary of food and tastes
• Learning an ingredient recommender from online recipes
• Statistical modelling of social media language and demographics (age, gender, politics etc)
• Learning language from statistics: words and their meanings
• More implementation-oriented:
• Building a creative human-like language generation system
• Building a question-answering system for visitors to the EECS website
• Building a spoken or text-based dialogue system to give information about EECS

Or if you have your own idea in these areas, or in the area of interaction design, I'm happy to listen to it. If you're interested, email me explaining what you'd like to do.

Postgraduate Projects

Some possible ideas for MSc or PhD projects:

• Distributional (vector-space) approaches to understanding dialogue/social media
  • (perhaps in a less-resourced language - Turkish? Farsi?
• Lightly supervised machine learning to detect meaning in dialogue/social media
  • (e.g. emotions? sarcasm? fact vs fiction? literal vs figurative language?
• Creative natural language generation (perhaps for jokes? poems? recipes?)
• Diagnosing mental health conditions from language
• Personality detection from social media profiles
• Learning an ingredient dictionary & recipe recommender
• Implementing a real-time dialogue processing/visualisation software platform
• A comparative study of clarification behaviour in Chinese (or a similar language) and English
• Investigating incremental planning for incremental natural language generation (PhD only)
• Improving our incremental dialogue system DYLAN (PhD only)
• Investigating grammar induction for Dynamic Syntax (PhD only)

Or if you have your own idea in these areas, I'm happy to listen to it. If you're interested, email me explaining what you'd like to do.