UNCC College of Computing and Informatics

Graduate Seminar (2008 Fall)

Title: The Subtle Side of Search

Elizabeth D. Liddy, Ph.D

Dean & Trustee Professor

School of Information Studies

Syracuse University

October 17 at 3:00pm
106 Woodward

Abstract:

Recent research that exploits the full range of Natural Language Processing capabilities is producing results which indicate that search engines will soon be able to go beyond the grosser indicators of a match to a query. Rather than retrieving documents based on just topical elements, or evaluating sites on just their thematic topicality and popularity, the more subtle aspects of what makes a document responsive to a user’s query – including temporal, certainty, emotive, and credibility aspects – can begin to be considered. This talk will present background on these and other more elusive aspects of textual relevance, but will focus mainly on recent accomplishments in this leading edge of information exploitation, both in the field in general and in our own work on pushing the boundaries towards more human like interpretation of relevance matching.

Bio:

Elizabeth D. Liddy is Dean and Trustee Professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, as well as founding director of the Center for Natural Language Processing (CNLP), which advances the development of human-like language understanding software capabilities for government, commercial and consumer applications.

Liddy has led 65 research projects, with the support of numerous government agencies, foundations, and commercial enterprises – all based on the use of NLP for improved information access and analytics. She has authored more than 110 research papers and given hundreds of conference presentations on her work. In addition, she is an inventor or co-inventor on seven patents in the area of natural language processing. Prior to assuming the position as Dean, Liddy taught in the areas of Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, and Data Mining. Liddy is also Chair of ACM-SIGIR for the 2007-2010 term.

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