Natural language research announcements

[Rajhans Samdani <rsamdan2 AT illinois.edu>]

Hi all!

Details follow. 

Speaker: Prof. Heng Ji (http://nlp.cs.qc.cuny.edu/hengji.html)

Time: 2 pm, Friday, Sept 23

Location: 3405, Siebel Center

Title: Leveraging Redundancy for Cross-Source Information Extraction, Fusion 
and 
Inference

Abstract:
One of the initial goals for Information Extraction (IE) was to create a 
knowledge base 
from the entire input corpus, such as a profile or a series of activities 
about any entity, 
and allow further logical reasoning on the knowledge base. In practice, such 
information may be scattered among a variety of sources (large-scale 
documents, 
languages, genres and data modalities). This requires the ability to identify 
topically-
related documents and to integrate facts, possibly redundant, possibly 
complementary, possibly in conflict, coming from these documents. 
Unfortunately the 
knowledge base constructed from a typical IE pipeline often contains lots of 
erroneous 
and conflicting facts. Interestingly, when the data grows beyond some certain 
size, 
the extracted facts become inter-dependent and thus we can take advantage of 
information redundancy to conduct reasoning across sources and improve the 
performance of IE. This talk will describe and compare four general 
frameworks to 
leverange reundancy based on Information Networks to conduct more complete 
information fusion and robust inference. Experiments on cross-document, cross-
lingual and cross-media IE will be presented and discussed.

Bio:
Heng Ji is an assistant professor and doctoral faculty in Computer Science at 
Queens 
College and the Graduate Center of City University of New York. She received 
her 
Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University in 2007. Her research 
interests 
focus on Information Extraction and Knowledge Discovery. She was the 
recipient of 
NSF CAREER Award in 2010. She is the coordinator of the NIST TAC Knowledge 
Base Population task in 2010 and 2011, and the IE area chair of NAACL-HLT2012.

See y'all!
Rajhans


Rajhans Samdani,
Graduate Student,
Dept. of Computer Science,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.