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General Keynote - Prof. Ophir Frieder
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Searching in the "Real World"
Professor Ophir Frieder Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA The Royden B. Davis, SJ, Chair in Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgetown University IITRI Chair Professor of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology Director, Information Retrieval lab (IIT) Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and AAAS Date: July 14, 2008 Time: TBA Location: Lance Burton Theater |
For many, "searching" is considered a mostly solved problem. In fact, for
text processing, this belief is factually based. The problem is that most
"real world" search applications involve "complex documents", and such
applications are far from solved. Complex documents, or less formally,
"real world documents", comprise of a mixture of images, text, signatures,
tables, etc, and are often available only in scanned hardcopy formats.
Search systems for such document collections are currently unavailable.
We describe our efforts at building a complex document information
processing prototype. This prototype integrates "point solution"
(mature) technologies, such as OCR capability, signature matching and
handwritten word spotting techniques, search and mining approaches, among
others, to yield a system capable of searching "real world documents".
The described prototype demonstrates the adage that "the whole is greater
than the sum of its parts". Our complex document benchmark development
efforts are likewise presented.
Having described the global approach, we describe some potential future
point solutions which we have developed over the years. These include an
Arabic stemmer and a natural language source integration fabric called the
Intranet Mediator. In terms of stemming, we developed and commercially
licensed an Arabic stemmer and search system. Our approach was evaluated
using the benchmark Arabic collections and favorably compared against
the state of the art.
We also focused on source integration and ease of user interaction.
By integrating structured and unstructured sources, we developed and
commercially licensed our mediator technology that provides a single,
natural language interface to querying distributed sources. Rather than
providing a set of links as possible answers, the described approach
actually answers the posed question. Both the Arabic stemmer and the
mediator efforts are likewise discussed.
Ophir Frieder is the Royden B. Davis, S.J., Chair in Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgetown University. Since 1998, he has been the IITRI Chair Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Information Retrieval Laboratory at the Illinois Institute of Technology, from which he is currently on leave. He frequently consults for industry and government and for key intellectual property litigation. His research interests focus on scalable information retrieval systems spanning search and retrieval and communications issues. His systems are deployed in commercial and governmental production environments worldwide. Recently, Springer Science and Business Media designated his co-authored book entitled Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Heuristics with the “Top Selling Title” award. He is the recipient of the 2007 ASIS&T Research in Information Science Award and is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and IEEE.
