时间：2015年4月20日,上午9：30- 11:00

地点：计算机所楼106会议室

报告人：Zhongyuan Wang

Title: Probase for Short Text Understanding

Abstract:Integrating, representing, and reasoning over human knowledge is a computational grand challenge for the 21st century. Currently, most IR approaches are keyword-based statistical approaches. When the input is sparse, noisy, and ambiguous, knowledge is needed to fill the gap. In this talk, I will focus on knowledge powered short text understanding. I will introduce the Probase project at Microsoft Research, whose goal is to enable machines to understand human communications. Probase is a universal, probabilistic semantic network. It contains millions of concepts, harnessed automatically from a corpus of billions of web pages. It enables probabilistic interpretations of search queries, document titles, ad keywords, etc. The probabilistic nature also enables it to incorporate heterogeneous information naturally. I will introduce the core technique called Conceptualization we develop on this probabilistic semantic network. The goal of conceptualization is to infer concepts in the text. I will show how we leverage conceptualization to improve current web search, ads matching, query recommendation, etc.

Bio:Zhongyuan Wang is one of the youngest Researchers at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) and a PhD candidate at Renmin University of China (RUC). He leads two projects at MSRA: Enterprise Dictionary (knowledge mining from Enterprise) and Probase (knowledge mining from Web). He received his master’s degree and bachelor's degree in computer science at Renmin University in 2010 and 2007 respectively. Zhongyuan Wang won Wu Yuzhang Scholarship (Top-level Scholarship at Renmin University), Kwang-Hua Scholarship, and ACM SIGMOD07 Undergraduate Scholarship (one of the seven winners all over the world) in the university. After he graduated from RUC, he joined MSRA as a Research Software Development Engineer, and then became an Associate Researcher. Until now, Zhongyuan Wang has published 10+ papers (including ICDE 2015 Best Paper) in the leading international conferences, such as VLDB, ICDE, CIKM, etc. He is also the translator of the book “Windows Phone 7 Programming for Android and iOS Developers”, published in 2012, and the co-author of the book “Web Data Management: Concepts and Techniques”, published in 2014. He guided 30+ interns, who got PhD offers from Harvard, Yale, CMU, UW, etc. His research interests include knowledge base, web data mining, semantic network, machine learning, and natural language processing.