Natural language research announcements

["Samdani, Rajhans" <rsamdan2 AT illinois.edu>]

Hi all!

This week we have a special AIIS/DAIS joint seminar. We're hosting Rajeev 
Rastogi from Yahoo! Research. Following are the details.

When: Friday, Dec 9, 1.30 pm (**not 2 pm**)

Where: 2405 Siebel Center (**not 3405*)

Title: Building knowledge bases from the web
Abstract:
The web is a vast repository of human knowledge. Extracting structured data 
from web pages can enable applications like comparison shopping, and lead to 
improved ranking and rendering of search results. In this talk, I will 
describe two efforts at Yahoo! Labs to extract records from pages at web 
scale. The first is a wrapper induction system that handles end-to-end 
extraction tasks from clustering web pages to learning XPath extraction rules 
to relearning rules when sites change. The system has been deployed in 
production within Yahoo! to extract more than 200 million records from ~200 
web sites. The second effort exploits content redundancy on the web to 
automatically extract records without human supervision. Starting with a seed 
database, we determine values in the pages of each new site that match 
attribute values in the seed records. We devise a new notion of similarity 
for matching templatized attribute content, and an apriori style algorithm 
that exploits templatized page structure to prune spurious attribute matches.

Bio:Previously Rajeev was a Bell Labs Fellow and the founding Director of the 
Bell Labs Research Center in Bangalore, India. Rajeev worked at Bell Labs 
from 1993 until 2008. During the period, he led a number of research projects 
that were incorporated into Lucent products and services. These include the 
Datablitz main-memory database system, the Fellini multimedia storage server, 
and the NetInventory auto-discovery engine. His research interests include 
database systems, data mining, and network management. His most recent 
research has focused on the areas of network monitoring and security, network 
graph compression and analysis, and video content dissemination.

See you!
Rajhans