 
Talk Topic: Less Searching, More Finding: Improving Human Information Access
William A. Woods, Sun Microsystems
April 4, 2007
Abstract
This talk describes some experiments combining the respective strengths of humans and computers in a knowledge-based system to help people find information in text. Unlike many previous attempts, this system demonstrates a substantial improvement in search effectiveness by using linguistic and world knowledge and exploiting sophisticated knowledge representation techniques. The system uses taxonomic subsumption technology on a large scale to organize and access domain-independent linguistic and world knowledge. It integrates syntactic, semantic, and morphological relationships to help solve some of the paraphrase problems that occur when there are terminology differences between what you ask for and what you need to find.
Bio
Dr. William A. Woods is internationally known for his research in natural language processing, continuous speech understanding, knowledge representation, and knowledge-based search technology.
He earned his doctorate at Harvard University, where he then served as an Assistant Professor and later as a Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science. He is a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dr. Woods built one of the first natural language question answering systems (LUNAR) to answer questions about the Apollo 11 moon rocks for the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center while he was at Bolt Beranek and Newman (now BBN Technologies) in Cambridge, Mass. He was the principal investigator for BBN's early work in natural language processing and knowledge representation and for its first project in continuous speech understanding. Subsequently, he was Chief Scientist for Applied Expert Systems, Inc. and Principal Technologist for On Technology Inc., two startup companies in Cambridge, Mass., before joining Sun Microsystems as a Distinguished Engineer in 1991.
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