Seminar by Dr. Davood Rafiei (University of Alberta)

Speaker: Dr. Davood Rafiei
                University of Alberta

Title: Efficiently querying natural language text

Date: Monday, July 27th, 2015

Time: 2:00PM

Place: EV3.309

ABSTRACT

Unstructured text has long coexisted with relational data  but has not been much treated as a first class citizen inside a relational database. Given that a large portion of text produced everyday in the public domain is primarily for human consumption, the data is often available in some form of natural language text. Searching such sources in granularities that are smaller than a document has been a challenge; yet querying for more factual information and relationships, or relating the encoded facts to more structured data provides many clear advantages.

In this talk, we give an overview of the work on natural language text as it pertains to querying. We showcase some of our work on the subject including some of the building blocks we have been working on querying, indexing and resolving queries. We conclude by presenting some of the challenges and open directions.

BIO

Dr. Davood Rafiei did his bachelor in Sharif University (Iran), his M.Sc. in Waterloo and his PhD in Toronto. He joined the University of Alberta in 2000, where he is now an Associate Professor of Computer Science and member of the Database Systems Research Group. Dr. Rafiei has served in the program committees of both database conferences such as SIGMOD and VLDB and Web conferences such as WWW. His areas of interest also span over databases and the Web and include integrating natural language text with relational data, Web information retrieval and similarity queries and indexing. Dr. Rafiei was a visiting scientist at Google (Mountain View) for a year between 2007-2008, a visiting professor at Kyoto University in 2014 and a visiting professor at the University of Paris (Descartes) in 2015.