Dominique Estival

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My main field of research is Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, that is making computers understand and process human languages. Over the past few years, I have moved between academic and industry research, with projects ranging from dialogue systems with virtual advisors to machine translation tools, and formal grammars development.

I am currently at the University of Western Sydney, managing the “Big Australian Speech Corpus” project under a LIEF Grant.

In 2008, I started the organisation of the Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzCLO) and since then I have chaired its Steering Committee, expanding it across Australia, with more than 600 high school students participating in 2010 (hear about it in the PM radio program, February 2010). In July 2009, the first Australian team participated in the International Linguistics Olympiads in Poland (hear about it in the Lingua Franca interview on ABC Radio, September 2009) and we participated again in the 2010 ILO in Sweden.

In 2008-2009, I taught the “Syntax” and “Syntax of English” subjects at the University of Sydney, where I am an Honorary Associate in the Department of Linguistics.

Aside from Natural Language Processing, my other interest is flying. I am now a flight instructor and for the past two years I have been combining linguistics and aviation with a research project investigating communication problems in the aviation environment and looking at language technologies as possible solutions (see publications). Most recently, as an invited speaker at the Free Linguistics Conference in Sydney, I gave an update on that project.

On this site, you can find information on:

• my research interests,
• my background and professional activities,
• some of my NLP/LT activities in Australia and internationally,
• links to some publications
• and more about my flying.

Email: dominique at dominique – estival . net

or dominique . estival at sydney . edu . au