Posts Tagged ‘information retrieval’

A twitter friend (@communicating) tipped me off to the UEA-Lite Stemmer by Marie-Claire Jenkins and Dan J. Smith.  Stemmers are NLP tools that get rid of inflectional and derivational affixes from words.  In English, that usually means getting rid of the plural -s, progressive -ing, and preterite -ed.  Depending on the type of stemmer, that [...]

This week has given me two new toys to play with, and you could probably say both were bought at the dollar store.  The first was Microsoft‘s release of Rebranded Live, aka Bing.  Bing’s search results have been poor (for me), but not much poorer than Google‘s.  Just enough poorer for me to see no [...]

There has been much ballyhoo in the blogosphere touting Google’s so-called foray into semantic search.  The blog post announcing the new feature doesn’t even mention the word semantics, but it does say it looks at associations and concepts related to your query.  I see no mention of tuples or anything of the sort and the [...]

Since I started blogging almost a year and a half ago, I have been following many blogs. I managed to find some blogs dealing with computational linguistics and natural language processing, but they were few and far between. Since then, I’ve discovered quite a few NLP people that have entered the blagoblag. Here is a [...]

I just finished reading about relevance-based language models for information retrieval (Lavrenko and Croft, 2001).  It’s an old paper, but some new stuff I was checking into relied on something else which relied on it — you know how the story goes. In information retrieval, there are many retrieval models that have been used over [...]

This is research I did a while ago and presented Monday to fulfill the requirements of my Masters degree.  The presentation only needed to be about 20 minutes, so it was a very short intro.  We have moved on since then, so when I say future work, I really mean future work.  The post is [...]

If you follow news on the semantic web or new search engines, you may have heard of hakia. TechCrunch has done a small write up about their new semantic search API. TechCrunch is brutally hard on startups who aren’t fully operational, so there is a lot of criticism in that article that I take with [...]

I’ve been messing around with recommender systems for the past year and a half, but not using the kNN (k-Nearest Neighbors) algorithm. However, my current homework assignment for my Information Retrieval class is to implement kNN for a subset of the Netflix Prize data. The data we are working with is about 800k ratings, which [...]

OpenEphyra is a question answering (QA) system developed here at the Language Technologies Institute by Nico Schlaefer. He began his work at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, but has since continued it at CMU and is currently a PhD student here. Since it is a home-grown language technologies package, I decided to check it [...]

When you go to a search engine, you have an information need. There is something you are searching for that you can only articulate imprecisely and you do so in a few words. People are good at determining if something satisfies their information need, but not so great at stating it clearly. Librarians are trained [...]