Language Technology Seminar Series


Title: Context and Query Triage

Speaker: Bruce Croft

Location: ICT Building, L2.06

Date: Friday, 7 May 2004

Time: 1-2.15pm

Abstract:

Context and personalization are often mentioned as the new "hot areas" for search. The problem is that achieving the goals defined for personalized search is not easy and there are few examples of successful applications (even including Google's personalized search). In this talk, I will describe work addressing some aspects of the use of context in search with a focus on what can be learned from the query.

Bio:

W. Bruce Croft is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, which he joined in 1979. In 1992, he became the Director of the NSF State/Industry/University Collaborative Research Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR), which combines basic research with technology transfer to a variety of government and industry partners. Dr. Croft is also currently the Chair of the Department of Computer Science. He received the B.Sc.(Honors) degree in 1973, and an M.Sc. in Computer Science in 1974 from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His Ph.D. in Computer Science was from the University of Cambridge, England in 1979. His research interests are in several areas of information retrieval, including retrieval models, Web search engines, cross-lingual retrieval, distributed search, question answering, text summarization, and text data mining. He has published more than 120 articles on these subjects, has served on numerous program committees, and has been involved in the organization of many workshops and conferences. Dr. Croft has consulted for many companies and government agencies and has worked with more than 80 industry and government members on technology transfer from CIIR. He co-founded a search engine startup in 1996, and his research is being used in a number of operational systems. Dr. Croft was a member of the National Research Council Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, 2000-2003, and he was Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 1995-2002. Dr. Croft was elected a Fellow of ACM in 1997, received the Research Award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology in 2000, and received the Gerard Salton Award from the ACM Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) in 2003.
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