Communicating with computers

Professor Robert Dale

Improving interaction between humans and machines is not only information technology’s next great challenge, it’s also an exciting and varied topic for postgraduate research.

Professor Robert Dale, Director of the Centre for Language Technology at Macquarie University – Australasia’s largest and longest-established body of researchers working in natural language processing, computational linguistics and language technology – says that postgraduate research in the field incorporates not just computing, but also aspects of psychology, engineering and linguistics.

“Language technology, most broadly construed, is any software system that is able to do things because it knows something about language,” Dale says. “That includes intelligent optical character recognition that is used to scan pages of text and then tries to work out what the words are, to much more sophisticated intelligent interactive systems where people communicate with machines and the machines do things on the basis of that communication.”

While most people would think of that communication in terms of speech, Dale says textual interactions – for example typing questions into a Web page and having them answered – are just as complicated.

“The speech is really the tip of the iceberg in some ways. You have to get from the speech to the words and then do something with the words and that’s where the linguistic knowledge really kicks in,” he says.

Some voice recognition systems are already being used commercially, such as Telstra’s directory assistance or taxi booking services.

“Anyone who’s used those systems will be aware that although they’re very effective for what they do, they’re still relatively primitive,” Dale says. “It’s already possible to build systems that can have fairly sensible conversations with you about booking flights, for example, but you want to push this further still so the systems are more all-encompassing in terms of what they do. That means understanding more about how people use conversation and building that into the technology.

“Ultimately what we might want to do is have machines that take on some of the behaviours and characteristics of humans in conversation, so that they respond intelligently, they can second guess what you’re getting at, they can understand when something isn’t clear and so on – so moving towards more natural dialogues with machines.”

So if you’re interested in building HAL, or just want to design a smarter Web search engine, contact Robert Dale at robert.dale@mq.edu.au or visit the Centre for Language Technology website at www.clt.mq.edu.au

“I’m always interested in talking to students who are fired up about doing interesting things with the computational processing of human language,” Dale says. “If you're a top-performing undergraduate student, we may be able to find work for you on a research project; and if you’re looking at doing a PhD and want to do first class work, we can find sources of funding.”

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