Understanding Global Content

Research Goals

We analyse, annotate and extract meaningful information and knowledge from textual content across multiple languages and domains. We develop a range of robust, domain-agnostic linguistic analysis tools, which can be applied to any language and which are informed by cues from non-linguistic sources.

We aim to develop the theories and technologies to understand the digital context through languages in the following three layers:

• Understanding the language forms and structures, including the morphology, syntax, semantics and discourse.  This research focuses on the base language technologies by utilising the state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning approaches to obtain cross-lingual, cross-domain and cross-modal content representations and improve the morphological, syntactic and semantic analysis performance for digital content.
• Understanding the physical world through languages, including objects, relations, events, times, and spaces.  This research focuses on using representations for reasoning on language styles, events and topics. Researchers will advance machine learning techniques for content-based analysis by focusing on co-reference to entities and events at varying granularity, along with devising question-answering technology for events and novelty-detection technology for monitoring topics/events.
• Understanding the human minds through languages, including the speaker's intentions, attitudes, the sentiments and emotions.  This research addresses the mechanics of variability in both the analysis and generation of digital content. Specific to this work is the notion that multiple layered meanings of words and word-phrases can vary not just because of the language, but the speaker, the medium and the context. Detecting changes in the meaning of words over time or by domain, assisting the disambiguation of phrases and terms, and the detection of meaning over larger structures than words alone.