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Bruce Croft
Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts
Lederle Graduate Research Center
Director, NSF State/Industry/University Collaborative Research Center
for Intelligent Information Retrieval

Effective Retrieval Through Corpus Analysis

November 21, 1996

3:30 pm, Wean Hall 7500


ABSTRACT
Analyzing the occurrences of words and patterns in large text corpora reveals much of how language is used in particular domains and publications. Simple statistical relationships often reflect important semantic relationships. Information retrieval systems are based primarily on a statistical view of text, but it is often assumed that linguistic tools, such as morphological analysis and thesauri, are necessary to improve the effectiveness of these systems. In this talk, I will describe how corpus analysis can be used to improve effectiveness by performing operations such as stemming and query expansion, and how it could potentially be used for other tasks such as data mining and cross-lingual retrieval.

SPEAKER BIO
Croft received the B.Sc.(Honours) degree in 1973, and an M.Sc. in Computer Science in 1974 from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His Ph.D. in Computer Science was from the University of Cambridge, England in 1979.

His research interests are in formal models of retrieval for complex, text-based objects, text representation techniques, the design and implementation of text retrieval and routing systems, and user interfaces. He has published more than 100 articles on these subjects. This research is also being used in a number of operational retrieval systems.

Croft was Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval from 1987 to 1991. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Information Systems and an Associate Editor for Information Processing and Management. He has served on numerous program committees and has been involved in the organization of many workshops and conferences. He has received 2 awards from the information industry for his research contributions, and recently became an ACM Fellow.

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