CIS Department Talk - April 10, 2008

The Department of Computer and Information Science & The Society of Computer Science Present

Speaker:	Elena Filatova, Columbia University, Department of Computer Science
Topic:	Answering Event-Related Questions
Date:	April 10, 2008, 2:30PM
Place:	John Mulcahy Hall, Room 132

Question-answering is a challenging research problem, which has attracted significant attention over the last few years. In my talk, I will first introduce the task of question-answering and discuss approaches for creating answers to factoid and open-ended questions. Then, I will present an approach that I developed for answering event-related open-ended questions that uses domain templates, for different event domains (for example, "earthquake" domain or "presidential election" domain). Currently, domain templates for information extraction (IE) tasks are created manually. I will describe a completely automatic procedure for generating domain templates, using a set of similar domain events. Finally, I will describe a "biography" domain and will talk about my research on identifying general biographical activities as well as activities typical for representatives of a particular occupation.

Bio:

Elena Filatova received her PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University and MSc in Computational Linguistics from University of Southern California. Her research interests are in the field of Artificial Intelligence, in general, and in Natural Language Processing in particular. Her thesis research focused on the problem of Question Answering, specifically on how to answer questions about activities and events

For more infromation, contact Ms. Danielle Aprea (718) 817-4480