»Chinese
Short Bio
I am Benjamin Han, or Ding-Jung Han (see the picture for the characters
in
Traditional
Chinese), a PhD student in
Language
Technologies Institute,
School of
Computer Science,
Carnegie Mellon University. Before coming to CMU I earned my
CS master
degree from
State University of New
York at Buffalo, working on Information Retrieval with
the
CEDAR Reseach
Group, and my other master degree in
Electrical
Engineering from
National Sun Yat-Sen
University,
Taiwan,
working on the diagnosis problem of combinatorial digital circuits using
model-based reasoning techniques and genetic algorithms.
Research
My research interests are temporal information
processing/reasoning, computational semantics and knowledge
representation. My thesis research,
"A
Constraint-based Framework for Resolution of Time in Natural
Language", deals with representing
and reasoning with temporal/event information conveyed in natural language. The fruit of this
research could greatly improve many real-world applications such
as text summarization, question answering and intelligence analysis. Members on my thesis committee are (alphabetical): Jaime
Carbonell (LTI, CMU, advisor), Scott
Fahlman (LTI, CMU), Michael
Kohlhase (CS, International University Bremen, Germany), and Alon
Lavie (LTI, CMU, advisor).
In CMU I've worked on
project RADAR,
where we build distributed agents helping humans with tasks
such as scheduling meetings, allocating resources, and
prioritizing requests. I've also participated
in GALE,
where we build "software technologies to absorb, analyze and
interpret huge volumes of speech and text in multiple
languages, ... automatically providing relevant, distilled
actionable information to military command and personnel in
a timely fashion". My system is used in both projects to normalize temporal
information found in texts. Other projects I've worked on in CMU include
LingWear
and Nespole
project, where techniques on grammar induction was
experimented for porting semantic grammars from one domain
to another.
In summer 2005 I worked for 3 months as an engineering
intern @ Google. In the
past I've also worked on NLP-based information retrieval and
model-based diagnosis of combinatorial digital circuits
using propositional calculus and genetic algorithms.
My other research interests include language acquisition, cognitive
science, and general AI.
