Working with our CMU partner, the objective of this project is to develop new technologies for Adaptive Filtering (AF).

We propose to develop and demonstrate an integrated set of techniques for building and adaptive, robust and distilled information access module for the Distillation Engine. Our module will be able to handle electronic newswire, transcriptions from broadcast news, telephone conversations, and talk shows, and web documents from newsgroups and weblogs, no matter whether they are originally in English or in Chinese, Arabic or surprise languages.

This project will provide students with an interactive, integrated and active learning environment. The goals of the proposed project are: 1) to review and organize current research and practice activities in the DL area with the aim of helping students to quickly understand and master the core concepts, challenges, and approaches of the field; 2) to design and develop a digital library that stores the outcome of our study in goal 1, and more importantly, to provide easy access to the stored information; 3) to evaluate rigorously the usefulness of the developed DL in the context of teaching DL courses; and 4) to raise awareness of the advantages of teaching courses with the help of a DL system in different departments and universities. The proposed DL system can improve the quality of the student’s learning experience and increase the effectiveness of that experience.

The goals of this project are 1) to explore the problem space in multiple evidence identification and combination for improving search effectiveness. 2) using both CLEF and TREC experiments as the realistic evaluation frameworks to test the ideas and systems developed for evidence identification and combination.      

Having reference librarians or human intermediaries in the information retrieval process is one of the big success stories in the development of libraries and library science. However, with wide use of Internet and the Web, more and more searches are performed without the help of human intermediaries. The goal of the SIM project is to transform the knowledge people developed for reference process into modern automatic retrieval process, and design a retrieval system that would be a useful assistant when working with librarians, and a smart automatic intermediary when acting alone.      

Even though the advancement of computer and network technology makes it possible for people to access information globally, our abilities are still dragged down by the fact that most of us lack of proficiency in foreign languages. Research on Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) helps developing algorithms for identifying relevance information in foreign languages, but many more difficult research problems are to be solved before a useful interactive cross-language information access system can be delivered. The ICLIA research project aims at attacking those problems, and developing tools based on natural language processing techniques to facilitate people to access information regardless of languages, and eventually to develop an efficient, user friendly cross-language information access system.

With the Web as the document collection having vast amount of information for almost every possible topic, the key for the success of a retrieval process is not to identify the relevant information, but to make the relevant information easy accessible to the user. HARD project tries to address this problem by inviting user in the loop. Our research interests in this project are mainly concentrated on using the HARD framework to explore various means to interact with users during the search process, and identify chunks of text (called passages) rather than the whole documents to satisfy users' information need.