Michael Niemann

  Caulfield School of Information Technology
  Monash University

PhD candidate

The Duality of Expertise: Identifying expertise claims and opinions within online forums

This research investigates building expertise profiles using emails from online discussion forums. An individual's areas of expertise will be based on the language used in their emails and the semantic relationships found between the terms. The expert's level of expertise will be determined through their language use and the responses given in other emails towards the expert and their emails.

Supervisors: Assoc. Prof. Henry Linger, Prof. Tim Baldwin (University of Melbourne)

Keywords: expert locator, expertise finder, user modelling, semantic similarity, WordNet, community opinion, sentiment detection

Linguistics, computational linguistics, historical education, artificial intelligence, cognitive sciences, human-computer interaction, technology for the hearing and sight impaired, information management, technical writing, project managment.

Education

• 2008-2014 - PhD candidate, Monash University
• 1997 - First Class Honours in Linguistics, University of Melbourne
• 1992-1996 - Bachelor of Arts/ Bachelor of Science, University of Melbourne

Roles

• 2014 - Tester, HCS vLab Alveo lingustic document archive and interface, RMIT
• 2010-2014 - Teaching Associate, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University
• 2004-2009 - Research Assistant, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University
• 1999-2003 - Computational Linguist, Toggletext Pty Ltd
• 1998 - Computational Linguist, Adacel Technologies Pty Ltd
• 1997 - Summer Intern, Macquarie Research Institute, Macquarie University
• 1996 - Summer Intern, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Melbourne
• 1995-1996 - Summer Intern, CASALA (Computer Aided Speech And Language Assessment), a Project Group for the Bionic Ear Institute

Question and answering, descriptions of bayesian reasoning, multiagent dialogue systems.
Machine translation, syntactic disambiguation, sense disambiguation, lexicon design, agent communication, children's morphology, WordNet, Prolog.

Teaching

• 2014
  • FIT1012 - Website Authoring
  • FIT3063/4063 - Human Computer Interfaces
  • FIT3098 - Social Informatics
  • FIT5086 - Organisational Informatics
• 2013
  • FIT2043 - Technical writing for Software Engineers
  • FIT3098/5090 - Social Informatics
  • FIT5086 - Information and knowledge management principles
  • FIT5166 - Information Retrieval Systems
  • FIT9006 - Information Technology Management
• 2012
  • FIT5086 - Information and knowledge management principles
  • FIT5150 - Project Management as a Knowledge-Based Practice
  • FIT5166 - Information Retrieval Systems
• 2011
  • FIT3098 - Social Informatics
  • FIT5086 - Information and knowledge management principles
  • FIT5150 - Project Management as a Knowledge-Based Practice
  • FIT5166 - Information Retrieval Systems
• 2010
  • FIT2053 - Web-based information systems
  • FIT2054 - Information management in organisations
  • FIT5086 - Information and knowledge management principles
  • FIT5166 - Information Retrieval Systems

• Niemann, M. (2014) , Finding expertise using online community dialogue and the Duality of Expertise. In Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2014, November 2014, pp 69-78. Melbourne, Australia.
• Zukerman, I., Makalic, E. and Niemann, M. (2009) , Interpreting two-utterance requests in a spoken dialogue system. In Proceedings of the 6th IJCAI Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical Dialogue Systems, 12 July 2009, AAAI Press, pp. 19-27, Pasadena, USA.
• Zukerman, I., Makalic, E., Niemann, M. and George, S. (2008) , A Probabilistic Approach to the Interpretation of Spoken Utterances. In Proceedings of the Tenth Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI-08), pp. ???, Hanoi, Vietnam.
• Makalic, E., Zukerman, I., Niemann, M. and Schmidt, D. (2008) , A Probabilistic Model for Understanding Composite Spoken Descriptions . In Proceedings of the Tenth Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI-08), pp. ???, Hanoi, Vietnam.
• Zukerman, I., Makalic, E. and Niemann, M. (2008) , Using Probabilistic Feature Matching to Understand Spoken Descriptions. In 21st Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI2008), pp 157-167, Auckland, New Zealand.
• Zukerman, I., Makalic, E. and Niemann, M. (2008) , Combining probabilistic reference resolution with simulated vision. In Fourth International Conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing, pp. ???, Sydney, Australia.
• Makalic, E., Zukerman, I. and Niemann, M. (2008) , A Spoken Language Interpretation Component for a Robot Dialogue System. In Proceedings of the 9th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2008) pp. 195-198, Brisbane, Australia.
• George, S., Zukerman, I. and Niemann, M. (2007) , Inferences, suppositions and explanatory extensions in argument interpretation . In User Modelling and User-Adapted Interaction, Volume 17, Number 5, pp 439-474, Springer, Netherlands.
• Niemann, M., Zukerman, I., Makalic, E., and George, S. (2007) , Hypothesis Generation and Maintenance in the Interpretation of Spoken Utterances. In Proceedings of the 20th Australian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 466-475, Gold Coast, Australia.
• George, S., Zukerman, I., Niemann, M., and Marom, Y. (2007) , Considering Multiple Options when Interpreting Spoken Utterances. In Proceedings of the 5th IJCAI Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical Dialogue Systems, pp 7-14, Hyderabad, India.
• Zukerman, I., Niemann, M., George, S., and Marom, Y. (2006) , Probabilistic, Multi-staged Interpretation of Spoken Utterances. In Proceedings of the 19th Australian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1215-1220, Hobart, Australia.
• Zukerman, I., Niemann, M. and George, S. (2006), Balancing Conflicting Factors in Argument Interpretation. In Proceedings of the 7th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, pp. 134-143, Sydney, Australia.
• George, S., Zukerman, I., and Niemann, M. (2005), Modeling Suppositions in Users' Arguments. In UM05 Proceedings -- the Tenth International Conference on User Modeling, pp. 19-29, Edinburgh, Scotland.
• Niemann, M., George, S., and Zukerman, I. (2005), Towards a Probabilistic, Multi-layered Spoken Language Interpretation System. In 4th IJCAI Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical Dialogue Systems, pp. 8-15, Edinburgh, Scotland.
• Zukerman, I., Kowalczyk, P., Niemann, M., and Raskutti, B. (2005), Supervised Machine Learning Techniques for Question Answering in Proceedings of the Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning for Answering Questions (KRAQ'05 - IJCAI 2005 Workshop), pp 89-96, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
• Kowalczyk, P., Zukerman, I., and Niemann, M. (2004), Analyzing the Effect of Query Class on Document Retrieval Performance. In AI'04 Proceedings -- the 17th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 550-561, Cairns, Australia.
• Zukerman, I., Niemann, M., and George, S. (2004), Improving the Presentation of Argument Interpretations Based on User Trials. In AI'04 Proceedings -- the 17th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 550-561, Cairns, Australia.
• George, S., Zukerman, I., and Niemann, M. (2004), An Anytime Algorithm for Interpreting Arguments. In PRICAI04 Proceedings -- the Eighth Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 311-321, Auckland, New Zealand.
• Niemann, M. (1998). "Resolving Prepositional Phrase Attachment Ambiguity using Lexical Preference and Semantic Association". Postgraduate Workshop -- NLP Fortnight, pp. 25-32, the University of Melbourne, Australia. (pdf version, ps version)
• Niemann, M. (1997). Resolving Prepositional Phrase Attachment Ambiguity using Lexical Preference and Semantic Association. Honours Thesis. The University of Melbourne, Australia. (Word97/2000)