Towards multi-modal extraction and summarization of conversations

Speaker:	Professor Raymond NG
		Department of Computer Science
		University of British Columbia

Title:		"Towards multi-modal extraction and summarization
		 of conversations"

Date:		Monday, 21 December 2009

Time:		10:00am - 11:00am

Venue:		Room 1504 (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

For many business intelligence applications, decision making depends
critically on the information contained in all forms of "informal" text
documents, such as emails, meeting summaries, attachments and web
documents. For example, in a meeting, the topic of developing a new
product was first raised. In subsequent follow-up emails, additional
comments and discussions were added, which included links to web documents
describing similar products in the market and user reviews on those
products. A concise summary of this "conversation" is obviously valuable.
However, existing technologies are inadequate in at least two fundamental
ways. First, extracting "conversations" embedded in multi-genre documents
is very challenging. Second, applying existing multi-document
summarization techniques, where were designed mainly for formal documents,
have proved to be highly ineffective when applied to informal documents
like emails.

In this presentation, we give an overview of email summarization and
meeting summarization methods. We give short demos on what we have
developed so far. We conclude by presenting several open problems that
need to be solved for multi-modal extraction and summarization of
conversations to become a reality.

*************************
Abstract:

Dr. Raymond Ng is a professor in Computer Science at the University of
British Columbia. His main research area for the past two decades is on
data mining, with a specific focus on health informatics and text mining.
He has published over 150 peer-reviewed publications on data clustering,
outlier detection, OLAP processing, health informatics and text mining. He
is the recipient of two best paper awards - from 2001 ACM SIGKDD
conference, which is the premier data mining conference worldwide, and the
2005 ACM SIGMOD conference, which is one of the top database conferences
worldwide. He was one of the program co-chairs of the 2009 International
conference on Data Engineering, and one of the program co-chairs of the
2002 ACM SIGKDD conference. He was also one of the general co-chairs of
the 2008 ACM SIGMOD conference. He was an editorial board member of the
Very large Database Journal and the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and
Data Engineering until 2008.

For the past decade, Dr. Ng has co-led several large scale genomic
projects, funded by Genome Canada, Genome BC and NSERC. The total amount
of funding of those projects well exceeded $40 million Canadian dollars.
He is also affiliated with the Heart and Lung Institute at the St Paul's
Hospital and the BC Cancer Research Centre.