Natural language research announcements

[Ming-Wei Chang <mchang21 AT uiuc.edu>]

This is a reminder for the talk of Dr. Douglas Downey. The talk will
start at 3:15 pm in room 3405. Hope to see you there!

Ming-Wei Chang 
<mchang21 AT uiuc.edu>
 writes:

> Dear faculty and students,
>
> Due to some conflicts, we have to move the talk of Dr. Douglas Downey
> (details below) earlier.  His talk will now start at 3:15pm and end at
> 4:15pm, on Feb 19th (this Thursday). The room number is 3405. Hope to
> see you there!
>
> Thank you,
> Ming-Wei
>
>
>> Title: Autonomous Web-scale Information Extraction
>>
>> Abstract:
>> Search engines are extremely useful tools for answering questions.  
>> However,
>> a significant number of questions users might pose -- for example, "which
>> nanotechnology companies are hiring on the West Coast?" -- cannot be
>> addressed using existing search engines, because the answers do not lie on 
>> a
>> single page.  To answer these kinds of queries, users must extract and
>> synthesize information from multiple documents.  Currently, this is a
>> tedious and error-prone manual process.
>>
>> In this talk, I will describe my research aimed at automating the 
>> extraction
>> of this information from the Web.  I will present a model of the redundancy
>> inherent in the Web, and show that the model can be used to identify 
>> correct
>> extractions autonomously, without the manually labeled examples typically
>> assumed in previous information extraction research.  However, the model 
>> has
>> limited efficacy for the "long tail" of infrequently mentioned facts; I
>> demonstrate how unsupervised language models can be leveraged in concert
>> with redundancy to overcome this limitation.  Lastly, I will describe 
>> recent
>> theoretical and experimental results illustrating that a generalization of
>> the redundancy-based approach is effective for a variety of textual
>> classification tasks, beyond information extraction.
>>
>> Bio:
>> Doug Downey is an assistant professor in the EECS Department of 
>> Northwestern
>> University, which he joined in the Fall of 2008.  He obtained his PhD from
>> the University of Washington, where he was advised by Oren Etzioni and
>> supported by an NSF Fellowship and Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship.
>> His research interests are in the areas of natural language processing,
>> machine learning, and artificial intelligence.  At UW, he was part of the
>> KnowItAll project, which was aimed at utilizing the Web to autonomously
>> extract large knowledge bases.  Doug's primary research results concern
>> probabilistic models of the redundancy inherent in large corpora, along 
>> with
>> associated techniques that allow systems like KnowItAll to extract data
>> autonomously at high precision.
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