Natural Language Processing for Web Applications

Haifeng Wang

Abstract:

Natural Language Processing (NLP) plays an essential role in many WWW applications, including search engines, social networks, online translation systems, and so forth. Almost all NLP techniques, ranging from morphological, syntactic, and semantic analysis, to question answering, machine translation, summarization, etc., can find their scopes in the WWW applications. However, conventional methodologies in NLP research need to be adapted and improved, so as to deal with new challenges arise from the new application requirements as well as the large-scale and highly noisy web corpora. This talk will discuss NLP technologies for real web applications, including the new applications, challenges, resources, and methodologies.

Bio:

Dr. WANG Haifeng is a senior scientist at Baidu. He is the head of Baidu's NLP department, and one of the core members of its search technology. He worked as an associate researcher at Microsoft Research China 1999~2000, a research scientist at iSilk.com (Hong Kong) 2000~2002, and chief research scientist at Toshiba (China) R&D Center till Jan. 2010. He has worked on many topics in natural language processing including: machine translation, parsing, generation, grammar induction, paraphrase, collocation extraction, SRL, WSD, LM. His researach interests also include search, speech and machine learning. He is the Vice-president-elect of ACL. Additional information is available at http://ir.hit.edu.cn/~wanghaifeng .