BSc Project Topics 2011-12

I am interested in supervising projects in the areas of Natural Language Processing, Agent-based social simulation, Text Mining and the Semantic Web.

These topics will be suitable for students who have taken at least one of these courses:

Sample topics

  1. Automated translation between English and another language with which you are familiar
  2. Extracting and analysing information from social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
  3. Topic detection and/or sentiment analysis: analysing texts to determine what they are about, and identifying positive and negative opinions.
  4. Use Semantic Web technologies to develop an ontology for a particular domain, with interfaces for users to query and update the content.
  5. Develop a unification (feature-based) grammar using the Natural Language Toolkit, which can parse a substantial sequence of prose such as a chidren's story.
  6. Implement and evaulate a probabilistic parser for natural language as described in Jurafsky and Martin (2008) ch. 14.
  7. Modify, extend or re-implement the system described in Isaac (2008) to model game-theoretic scenarios such as the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Useful reading

  1. Steven Bird, Ewan Klein and Edward Lopez, Natural Language Processing with Python, O'Reilly Media, 2009. ISBN-13: 978-0596516499.
  2. Jacob Perkins, Python Text Processing with NTLK 2.0 Cookbook, PACKT PUBLISHING (23 Nov 2010). ISBN-13: 978-1849513609
  3. Matthew Russell, Mining the Social Web: Analyzing Data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Other Social Media Sites, O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (8 Feb 2011) . ISBN-13: 978-1449388348
  4. Alan G. Isaac (2008). Simulating Evolutionary Games: A Python-Based Introduction. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation
  5. Toby Segaran, Colin Evans and Jamie Taylor, Programming the Semantic Web, O'Reilly, 2009. ISBN-13: 978-0596153816
  6. Daniel Jurafsky and James Martin, Speech and Language Processing: an Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition, Pearson Education; 2 edition (29 April 2008) ISBN-13: 978-0135041963