[ChimeText] 24 Jul (next Thursday): Chin Yew-Lin / Web Scale Question Answering -- SQuAD

[Min-Yen Kan]

(Corrected speaker's name in announcement, sorry! -M)

Hi CHIMETEXT members:

Hwee Tou has arranged additional talks at NUS by the MSRA folks, which
will be on 24 Jul afternoon (next Thursday; overlapping with the SIGIR
workshops).
Please do make the time to come to this talk if you are not
participating in the SIGIR workshops.

TITLE : Web Scale Question Answering  -- SQuAD
SPEAKER : Dr Chin Yew-Lin, Microsoft Research Asia
TIME : July 24, 2008, 4:00pm - 5:00pm, Thu
VENUE : SR7, COM1, Level 2 Room 7

Chaired by Dr Ng Hwee Tou (nght at comp.nus.edu.sg)

ABSTRACT:

Question answering has been a very active research field in
information retrieval and natural language processing. Despite the
success of TREC QA track, large scale robust QA systems are still yet
to be found in the real world. In this talk, I will briefly introduce
recent progress on SQuAD --a question and answering project aiming to
crawl, index, and serve all question and answer pairs existing on the
web.  I will address six main challenges of the project and then focus
on the topic of question search and recommendation. Three demos will
be shown to highlight how SQuAD technologies can be used in different
scenarios.


BIODATA:

Dr. Chin-Yew LIN is a lead researcher and research manager at
Microsoft Research Asia. Before joining Microsoft in 2006, he was a
senior research scientist at the Information Sciences Institute at
University of Southern California (USC/ISI) where he worked in the
Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation group since 1997.
His research interests are automated summarization, opinion analysis,
question answering, computational advertising, community intelligence,
machine translation, and machine learning.

Recently, his main focus is developing scalable automatic question
answering and distillation system -- SQuAD. He also developed
automatic evaluation technologies for summarization, QA, and MT. In particular,
he created the ROUGE automatic summarization evaluation package. It
has become the de facto standard in summarization evaluations. More
than 200 research sites worldwide have downloaded this package.


Upcoming Talks:
18 Jul: (related seminars) 3 seminars on 1) Real-Time Document Image
Retrieval with LLAH 2) Large-Scale and Real-Time Specific Object 3)
Pattern recognition with supplementary information
24 Jul:  Chin Yew-Lin / Web Scale Question Answering  -- SQuAD
25 Jul: Yahoo! Research Labs talks:
4 talks on 1) Evgeniy Gabrilovich / Overview of Computational
Advertising 2) Rosie Jones / Geography in Web Search 3) Donald Metzler
/ Predicting when (not) to Advertise 4) Vanessa Murdock / Diversifying
Image Search with User Generated Content
28 Jul: Qiu Long / Context for Semantic Similarity