Natural language research announcements

[Julia Hockenmaier <juliahmr AT cs.uiuc.edu>]

****** Note the unusual time and location for the AIIS seminar  
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   Information Extraction, Data Mining and Joint Inference
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                Andrew McCallum
   University of Massachusetts Amherst

               Tuesday, April 7, 3:30pm
              Siebel Center Room 1404


Abstract: Although information extraction and data mining appear  
together in many applications, their interface in most current systems  
could be better described as serial juxtaposition rather than as tight  
integration.  Information extraction populates slots in a database by  
identifying relevant subsequences of text, but is usually not aware of  
the emerging patterns and regularities in the database.  Data mining  
methods begin from a populated database, and are often unaware of  
where the data came from, or its inherent uncertainties.  As a result  
the accuracy of both suffers, and accurate mining of complex text  
sources has been beyond reach.

In this talk, Dr. McCallum will describe work in probabilistic models  
that perform joint inference across multiple components of an  
information processing pipeline in order to avoid the brittle  
accumulation of errors.  The need for joint inference appears not only  
in extraction and data mining, but also in natural language  
processing, computer vision, robotics and elsewhere.  He will argue  
that joint inference is one of the most fundamental issues in  
artificial intelligence.

Dr. McCallum will present recent work in conditional random fields for  
information extraction and integration, with a focus on joint  
inference through stochastic approximations, weighted first-order  
logic, and new methods of probabilistic programming that enable  
reasoning about large-scale data.  He will close with a demonstration  
of Rexa.info, a digital research library that leverages these  
techniques.

Biographical: Andrew McCallum is an Associate Professor and Director  
of the Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory in the Computer  
Science Department at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  He has  
published over 100 papers in many areas of AI, including natural  
language processing, machine learning, data mining and reinforcement  
learning, and his work has received over 13,000 citations.  He  
received his PhD from University of Rochester in 1995 with Dana  
Ballard and a postdoctoral fellowship from CMU with Tom Mitchell and  
Sebastian Thrun.  Afterward he worked in an industrial research lab,  
where he spearheaded the creation of CORA, an early search engine that  
used machine learning for spidering, extraction, classification and  
citation analysis.  In the early 2000's he was Vice President of  
Research and Development at WhizBang Labs, a 170-person start-up  
company that used machine learning for information extraction from the  
Web.  He was the Program Co-chair for the International Conference on  
Machine Learning (ICML) 2008, and a member of the boards of the  
International Machine Learning Society, the CRA Community Computing  
Consortium and the editorial board of the Journal of Machine Learning  
Research.  For the past ten years, McCallum has been active in  
research on statistical machine learning applied to text, especially  
information extraction, co-reference, document classification,  
clustering, finite state models, semi-supervised learning, and social  
network analysis.

For more information: Work on search and bibliometric analysis of open- 
access research literature can be found at http://rexa.info.  Andrew  
McCallum's web page ishttp://www.cs.umass.edu/~mccallum.

Collaborators: Charles Sutton, Aron Culotta, Khashayar Rohanemanesh,  
Chris Pal, Greg Druck, Karl Schultz, Sameer Singh, Pallika Kanani,  
Kedare Bellare, Michael Wick, Rob Hall, David Mimno and Gideon Mann.
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     Julia Hockenmaier
     Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois
     3324 Siebel Center, 201 N Goodwin Ave
     Urbana, IL 61801-2302, USA
     Tel: +1 (217) 265-6855    Fax: +1 (217) 265-6591
     http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/~juliahmr
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