[Colloquium] Dragomir R. Radev on Friday, December 3, 2004

[Margery Ishmael]

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

Date: Friday, December 3, 2004
Time: 12:00 noon
Place: Ryerson 255

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Speaker:  DRAGOMIR R. RADEV

From:  University of Michigan

Url:  http://tangra.si.umich.edu/~radev/

Title:  Social network analysis of text

Abstract:

Textual data is everywhere, in email and scientific papers, in
online newspapers and e-commerce sites. The Web contains more than 200
terabytes of text not even counting the contents of dynamic textual
databases. This enormous source of knowledge is seriously
underexploited. Textual documents on the Web are very hard to model
computationally: they are unstructured, time-dependent, collectively
authored, and of uneven importance.  Traditional grammar-based
techniques don't scale up to address such problems. Novel
representations and analytical tools are needed.

NewsInEssence (www.newsinessence.com) is a system that crawls the
Web for news, automatically clusters them by topic, and produces
user-defined extractive summaries of each cluster. A recent addition
to the battery of summarization algorithms available to NewsInEssence
is the Cosine Centrality method.  In this talk I will describe how one
can apply the theory of social networks and stochastic processes (in
particular rank-based prestige and random walks on undirected graphs)
to multi-document text summarization.

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Host: Prof. PARTHA NIYOGI