Natural language research announcements

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

Dear faculty and students,

A Ph.D. student of CS department at University of Texas at Austin,
Lilyana Mihalkova, will give a talk (details below) for the AIIS seminar
at 10:00 am, May 27-th (next Wednesday morning). The room number is SC 3405. 
Hope to
see you there!

Title:

Structure Learning in Relational Domains and an Application of
Relational Learning to Web Query Disambiguation

Abstract:

Machine learning has progressed remarkably in the past decades, but
most effort has focused on learning from data in which each entity is
independent of the rest. In contrast, in many applications, entities
of varying types are connected by a rich set of relations, such as
collaborations and shared interests in a social network. A fundamental
challenge in learning from such relational data is discovering the
structure, or the dependencies and regularities present among the
relations in the data. In the first part of the talk, I will use
Markov logic, a general and expressive representation, to show how to
learn structure accurately and efficiently by transferring a source
model that was previously acquired in a different but related
domain. I will describe in detail an algorithm that revises the source
model in the case when a significant amount of data from the target
domain is available. I will then briefly address transfer learning in
the challenging case when target-domain data is severely limited, as
well as structure learning from scratch. In the second part of the
talk, I will describe our recent progress on applying Markov logic to
the problem of resolving ambiguities in Web searches.  In contrast to
previous research on this topic, our work does not assume the
availability of a long history of each user's interactions with the
search engine. Instead, our system bases its predictions on a short
glimpse of user search activity, captured in a session of 4-6 previous
searches on average, by relating the current session to previous
similarly short sessions of other users.

BIO:

Lilyana Mihalkova is a Ph. D. candidate in the Department of Computer
Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.  She is a member of the
Machine Learning group, led by Prof. Raymond Mooney. Halfway through
her doctorate, she spent the summer of 2007 at Microsoft Research as
an intern in the Text Mining, Search, and Navigation group. Her
research interests include statistical relational learning, transfer
learning, and applications to social networking and web domains.