Problems with Macquarie University Website

If Macquarie University wants to recruit students, then they need to design better web pages. I clicked on an advertisement for Macquarie University Information Day and got a web page which said "Thursday 3 January 9am to 4pm" but provided no other information.

Examining the source code of the page, it appears there is information about the open day, it just doesn't display with my Firefox 17 web browser. The W3C Markup Validation Service reports 20 errors on the page. The W3C mobileOK Checker gives the page a score of 0 out of 100 (the worst possible), with 5 errors described as "critical". One odd error is that there is a PNG image with a file name of ,jpg (indicating it is a JPEG image).

The AChecker web accessibility tester reports 14 problems with the W3C WCAG 2.0 (Level AA) guidelines. Interestingly the AChecker displayed an advertisement for Monash University alongside the Macquarie University results and that web page worked fine.

ps: I would have sent a note about this to Macquarie University, but  when I clicked on "Contact Us" on their web page I got another blank page, with no contact details.

Reinventing the Australian Government in Sydney

Greetings from GovHack at Macquarie University in Sydney There are about 50 people here for the final session of the weekend event. Currently we are watching presentations from the Canberra node, where there are about another 100 people. They are showing applications using interesting combinations of government data in news ways: turning weather data into 2D jewelery, combining bus stop data with geographic databases to plot the easiest walking route to the bus stop. One of the most sophisticated proposals was Peter Chen's "WatChr" political analysis tool. Another application of notes was "Walk My Way", to encourage people to walk part of their journey before catching the bus.

A summary of the GovHack projects will be presented to GovCamp at University of Canberra on Tuesday:

ps: One of the more unusual uses of government data was an analysis of a proposal for a solar powered very fast train from Sydney to Canberra. This seemed fanciful, but developments in lithium iron batteries, developed for cars have made the batterers large enough to be considered for trains. Obviously the solar panels would not be located on the train but alongside.

FootySpeak: Natural Language Generation for AFL Reports in Aboriginal Languages and English

Greetings from the School of Language Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra, where Mark Dras, Department of Computing, Macquarie University is speaking on "Arrernte Footy: A Computational Grammar and Natural Language Generation System for Arrernte". The idea is to generate natural language new articles in English and Arrernte automatically from the data about an AFL football match. This is of interest to researchers, as well as having commercial application in financial and sports reporting, where there is a regular structure to what is reported and lots of statistics. This is also of interest for teaching languages and making languages more understandable. It occurs to me that the English language description of an AFL match is not really in English, it is in "FootySpeak", a subset of English (like Seaspeak). The same approach might be used to generate weather reports and emergency warnings, in a readable, but very precise language. The problem is that messages have to be created quickly in high stress situations.

A content selector, planner, deep realizer, dictionary complier, XLE and Weighted Finite-State Transducers (WFSTs) are used in turn to create the natural language sentences. A lexical functional grammar is used to describe the structure of sentences in the language. For Arrernte some featured not required in English are used, such as for reduplication. Also Glue semantics could be used, if the software would support it.

Some of the research was carried out at the Ngurratjuta Lightning Carnival (Lightning football is a shortened version). One use for the automatically generated text would be for teaching reading in schools, as football will be of many interest to many students than other topics.

Mark needs some recording or text of descriptions of football matches in Arrernte, so if you have any contact him.

ps: It would be interesting to generate Roy and HG commentary.

Arrernte Footy: Natural Language Generation for AFL Reports in Aboriginal Languages

Mark Dras, Department of Computing, Macquarie University will speak on "Arrernte Footy: A Computational Grammar and Natural Language Generation System for Arrernte" at the Australian National University School of Language Studies in Canberra, 4pm, today. He will discuss the analysis of reports of AFL football matches in the language of the Arrernte people of Mparntwe (Alice Springs).

ANU School of Language Studies
Monday 13 February SEMINAR 4 pm Baldessin Building, room W 3.03 (Map)

Mark Dras, Department of Computing, Macquarie University

Title: A Computational Grammar and Natural Language Generation System for Arrernte

Abstract:

Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems have as their goal the generation of human-like text from some underlying representation, often numerical or other data from a database. We are currently developing an NLG system to generate texts in both English and Arrernte about Australian Rules football games, of the sort found in newspapers after a game has been played (e.g. "GEELONG has claimed the club's ninth premiership and marked itself as one of the greatest sides of all time with a stunning 38-point Grand Final win against Collingwood...."). The final stage of this system is a realisation component that is built around Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) and its XLE environment for grammar development: this takes a description of the functional structure of a sentence, and uses a computational grammar to make appropriate lexical and syntactic choices to produce the actual sentence. A large-scale grammar of English has already been developed by the international ParGram project, which we will be using; we are now building a computational grammar of Arrernte, based on existing linguistic descriptions of the language.

In the talk I will give an overview of this system, with a focus on the computational grammar of Arrernte, in particular how we've implemented in the LFG formalism a number of constructions that have been discussed in the literature, such as complex predicates like associated motion.