Seminars & Events

Computation Institute 3-D Program
"Finding documents and reading them: Keyphrase indexing, Topic browsing, Realistic books"

DATE: November 1, 2007
TIME: 12:00 pm
SPEAKER: Ian Witten, University of Waikato
LOCATION: Ryerson 251, University of Chicago

Description:
My research group in New Zealand is working on several projects in information retrieval. I will present an algorithm for automatically extracting keyphrases that uses machine learning to determine the most significant phrases in a document based on their statistical, syntactic, and semantic properties. I will describe a novel interface for interactive query expansion that uses a thesaurus derived from Wikipedia to bridge the terminology of the user's query and the terminology used within documents. Finally I will demonstrate a realistic three-dimensional book-style visualization of documents in a digital library collection. Physical book models offer readers something beyond traditional computer-based paging or scrolling systems, and can be enhanced with metadata to further enrich the browsing experience.

Ian H. Witten is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand where he directs the New Zealand Digital Library research project. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by demonstration. He has published widely in these areas, including several books, the most recent being Managing Gigabytes (1999), How to build a digital library (2003), Data Mining (2005) and Web Dragons (2007), all from Morgan Kaufmann. He received an MA in mathematics from Cambridge University, England; an MSc in computer science from the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in electrical engineering from Essex University, England. He is a fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He received the 2004 IFIP Namur Award, a biennial honour accorded for “outstanding contribution with international impact to the awareness of social implications of information and communication technology” and the 2005 SIGKDD Service Award for “an outstanding contribution to the data mining field” and in 2006 the Royal Society of New Zealand Hector Medal for “an outstanding contribution to the advancement of the mathematical and information sciences.”

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