Events Calendar

CS Colloquium Event: Facebook Tech Talk - Query Understanding and Semantic Search

Speaker: Haixun Wang, Facebook

Talk Title: Facebook Tech Talk - Query Understanding and Semantic Search

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.
Understanding short texts is crucial to many applications, but challenges abound. First, queries do not always observe the syntax of a written language. As a result, traditional natural language processing methods cannot be easily applied. Second, queries usually do not contact in sufficient statistical signals to support many state-of-the-art approaches for text processing such as topic modeling. Third, queries are usually more ambiguous. We argue that knowledge is needed in order to better understand short texts. In this talk, I describe how to use lexical semantic knowledge provided by a well-known semantic network for short text understanding. Our knowledge-intensive approach disrupts traditional methods for tasks such as text segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and concept labeling, in the sense that we focus on semantics in all the set tasks. We conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation on real-life data. The results show that knowledge is indispensable for short text understanding, and our knowledge-intensive approaches are effective in harvesting semantics of short texts.

Biography: Haixun Wang is a Research Scientist at Facebook and he manages the Query and Document Understanding team. Before Facebook, he was with Google Research, working on natural language processing. From 2009 to 2013, he led research in semantic search, graph data processing systems, and distributed query processing at Microsoft Research Asia. He had been a research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center from 2000 -“ 2009. He was Technical Assistant to Stuart Feldman (Vice President of Computer Science of IBM Research) from 2006 to 2007, and Technical Assistant to Mark Wegman (Head of Computer Science of IBM Research) from 2007 to 2009. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2000. He has published more than 150 research papers in referred international journals and conference proceedings. He served PC Chair of conferences such as CIKM'12, and he is on the editorial board of journals such as IEEE Transactions of Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) and Journal of Computer Science and Technology (JCST). He won the best paper award in ICDE 2015, 10 year best paper award in ICDM 2013, and best paper award of ER 2009.

Host: CS Department

Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 101

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair