Honours Project Page

In general, I'm open to project suggestions if there's something you already have in mind. Regarding specific topics from me, here are a few:

Simulating Language Evolution

This project will use SWARM (www.swarm.org), a set of libraries for agent-based simulation used under Java or Objective C. Some background on the idea of agent-based simulation is available in the book

Epstein, Joshua and Robert Axtell (1996), Growing Artificial Societies. MIT Press. MIT, MA.

The first is part of an investigation of the evolution of language via simulation. This is part of an existing project, and will involve some subset of

extending an already-existing simulation with new language phenomena -- initially we'll concentrate on a well-studied phenomenon, the change in Old English from verb-second to its current syntax;
porting existing code to the Web;
investigating how social interaction (e.g. different geographic or demographic profiles) affects the model;
researching and implementing agents with heuristic search (genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, etc) to see whether they can find parameter settings that match empirical results.

Simulating Economic Behaviour in Artifical Societies

The second project is if you have some background in economics: using SWARM to build a model of some aspect behaviour there (say, pricing in a monopsonistic market), and seeing how classical economic theory compares with a model which allows relaxation of e.g. assumptions of perfect knowledge. I am (along with Debbie Richards and Yusuf Pisan) currently talking with Prof John Mathews of the Graduate School of Management about a project he's interested in exploring, on competition between firms. Neoclassical economics assumes all firms are the same, that they make instantaneous responses to market signals with perfect knowledge, and that differences occur because of the "environment". Simulation allows relaxation of these assumptions and a more realistic model of economic activity. So there's some scope for a project on this.

More specifically, the project would involve recreating and extending a model from the following paper:

Bruun, Charlotte (1999). Endogenous Growth with Cycles in a Swarm Economy: Fighting Time, Space and Complexity. In Francesco Luna and Benedict Stefansson (eds.), Economic Simulations in Swarm: Agent-Based Modelling and Object Oriented Programming.

In fact, if you're interested in any field where you might want to model some phenomenon (ecology, physics, whatever) and compare the result with a classical approach, I'd be interested too.

Machine Translation

This would involve investigating a specific language pair and examining issues in machine translation with respect to that pair. Very recent work at Johns Hopkins University has been exploring integrating structural approaches (where you design rules for translation) with statistical approaches (where the system "learns" translation). A specific project would be to replicate the preliminary work from Johns Hopkins with a closer language pair (say, English-French), and to evaluate results relative to purely structural or purely statistical approaches. A more general project in this area is also possible. Component parts of such a project would be some subset of:

examining various formalisms and analysing their advantages and shortcomings for this particular task;
investigating formal properties of the chosen formalism;
building a grammar (including translation component) for the pair;
building an MT system.

Paraphrase

This project would be related to some of my research on paraphrasing. The idea would be to build a system, using an existing broad-coverage parser, together with an existing mathematical optimisation package, to build a system that would take a text (e.g. a paper) and fit it to a set of constraints (e.g. a 2000 word limit with sentences of middling complexity).