Text Understanding Using a Probabilistic Knowledgebase

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Date:           Friday, 10 February 2011

Time:           2:00pm - 3:30pm

Venue:          Lecture Theatre J (Chiang Chen Lecture Theatre), HKUST
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Speaker:        Dr. Haixun WANG
                Microsoft Research Asia

Title:          "Text Understanding Using a Probabilistic Knowledgebase"

Abstract:

Integrating, representing, and reasoning over human knowledge is a
computational grand challenge for the 21st century. In this talk, I will
introduce the Probase project at Microsoft Research Asia. The goal of the
Probase project is to enable machines to understand human communications.
Much interest has been devoted to building universal ontologies, either
automatically constructed or built by community effort, but these have
limited scope. Freebase, the best-known community-built taxonomy, contains
approximately 1,500 concepts, a far cry from covering everything that
exists. Probase is a universal, probabilistic taxonomy more comprehensive
than any current taxonomy. It contains more than 2 million concepts,
harnessed automatically from a corpus of 1.68 billion web pages and two
years' worth of search-log data. It enables probabilistic interpretations
of this information. The probabilistic nature enables it to incorporate
heterogeneous information naturally. I will explain how the core taxonomy,
which contains hypernym-hyponym relationships, is constructed and how it
models knowledge's inherent uncertainty, ambiguity, and inconsistency.


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Biography:

Haixun Wang is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing,
China, where he leads the data management team. Before joining Microsoft,
he had been a research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
for 9 years. Haixun Wang has published more than 120 research papers in
referred international journals and conference proceedings. He is
associate editor of IEEE Transactions of Knowledge and Data Engineering
(TKDE), Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS), Journal of Computer
Science and Technology (JCST). He is PC co-Chair of CIKM 2012, ICMLA 2011,
WAIM 2011. Haixun Wang got the ER 2008 Conference best paper award (DKE 25
year award), and ICDM 2009 Best Student Paper run-up award.