|
The idea for the Power project began when two leading researchers in Language Technology decided to collaborate on some research. Robert Dale came to Australia in 1994 and became the Director of Macquarie University’s Centre for Language Technology. When his colleague Cécile Paris arrived in 1996 to run CSIRO’s Intelligent Interactive Technology Group they decided to work together on developing Language Technology to get information out of databases.
This is a relatively under-explored research area in this country, Australia, says Robert Dale.
There’s not a lot of work goes on in this country in Natural Language Processing or Language Technology generally … Natural Language Processing has sub-fields within it, and the area I focussed on was Natural Language Generation. That’s in opposition to Natural Language Understanding. These are two different sides of the coin. It turns out that this was also Cécile’s core area of expertise, so it was very natural for us to look for a project in that area.
Activity
Based on what you know of the project so far suggest the roles team members would need to fulfill.
The team
Having decided on the nature of the project, Robert Dale (Centre for Language Technology) and Cécile Paris (Intelligent Interactive Technology Group) put together a team of researchers from their organisations to do the research.
Robert ran a team at the Centre for Language Technology, including Steven Green and Karen Verspoor. Cécile ran a team at the CSIRO with Maria Milosavljevic. The core group was sometimes expanded with part-time summer students and various others.
Each of the researchers brought their own specialist skills and expertise.
Programming
Steven Green played a central role. He is a computer programmer specialising in building systems that manipulate large bodies of text.
Linguistics
Cécile Paris and Karen Verspoor were the main people involved in the linguistics end of the project because they knew about the language side of things.
Web-based presentation
When it came to building the web-based systems the project needed, Maria had the specialist experience, and had even developed some of the core concepts the project used as part of her PhD research.
Project management and database expertise
Robert oversaw the project, and brought particular experience in techniques for selecting and producing short data-based object descriptions.
Activity
Identify the project management skills Robert Dale would have used to manage this project. - Visit the PEBA-II web site and spend some time exploring the capabilities of PEBA-II. Report your observations in point form.
|
