Title: Diversity and its Applications in Search, Summarisation and Related Information Selection Tasks
Speaker: Marcin Sydow, Polish Academy of Sciences and Polish-Japanese Institute of IT
Date: Thursday June 12, 2014
Time: 11:30am
Location: Slonim Room (430) - Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax.
Abstract:
The concept of diversity has recently gained increasing interest in a wide range of applications including: web search, database querying, recommender systems, and automatic summarisation. The approach consists in returning to the user the set of information items (e.g. search results, or recommended items, etc.) that is not only generally relevant but also diversified. The rationale behind diversfying the result set is to reduce potential result redundance. This allows covering of potentially many various aspects or views, to at least partially satisfy the unkown user's information needs, expressed in a potentially ambiguous query. We will present various approaches, based on combinatorial optimisation (e.g. on Facility Dispersion Problem), as well as on probabilitic techniques. We will also briefly present some recent results and examples of applications including: diversified entity summarisation on semantic knowledge graphs (DIVERSUM), diversified search engine query suggestions or diversity-aware query-by-example entity search (QBEES). We will also discuss some ongoing work and future directions.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Marcin Sydow is the Head of Web Mining Lab and of the Chair of Intelligent Systems, Algorithms and Mathematics at Polish-Japanese Institute of IT as well as Assistant Professor at Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Computer Science, Warsaw Poland. He received M.Sc. (Mathematics) from Warsaw University and Ph.D (Computer Science) from Polish Academy of Sciences. His research interests include Web Search, Web Mining, algorithms, elements of AI and Natural Language Processing. He has published over 50 scientific publications and serves as a PC member and reviewer in many international conferences and journals. He received several prizes (ECML/PKDD 2007 Discovery Challenge, 2008 DAAD Prize for funding research visit at Max-Planck Institute, Saarbruecken, etc.) and several state grants for conducting research in Poland in 2011-2015. His recent research interests include the concept of diversity in information sciences and novel information-processing algorithms for semantic knowledge graphs.