Abstract:

This talk will be an overview of part of research that has been carried out by the Information Retrieval group at the Robert Gordon University, UK. The key issue is how context and domain knowledge structures are incorporated not only to improve retrieval performance in a traditional sense, e.g. Mean Average Precision, but also to improve users' search experience by facilitating effective exploration and interaction. A wide range of topics will be covered, including two formal models for improving relevance feedback and query expansion, textual case based reasoning for re-use of past experiences, text-based knowledge discovery to faciliate the above models and to support assisted information seeking and exploration, and an information foraging theory based approach to modelling and understanding users and user interactions.

Biography:

Prof Dawei Song is Chair professor of Computing and has been leading the Information Retrieval research group at the Robert Gordon University since November 2008. His major research interests include formal models for context-sensitive information retrieval, enterprise search, multimedia and social media search, domain specific search, and text-based knowledge discovery in particular domain knowledge structure discovery and adaptation for interactive and exploratory search. In the recent 5 years, he has been a Principal Investigator for large number of major research projects funded by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and European Union, over GPB 1.3 million in total. He has published papers regularly on respected journals such as ACM TOIS, JASIST and IEEE TKDE, and top conferences such as ACM SIGIR, CIKM and ACL. He is the Secretary of the Information Retrieval Specialists Group of British Computer Society. He has served as an editor, chair, program committee member, invited speaker or reviewer for a large number of journals, conferences/workshops and funding bodies. He was programme committee co-chair of the Second International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR2009) and the Fifth Asia Information Retrieval Symposium (AIRS2009), and Sponsorship chair for SIGIR2010.