Web IR/NLP Group @ NUS research news update - Jun 2013

[Min-Yen Kan]

Summer greetings from the Web, IR & NLP Group (WING) at NUS!

You are receiving this email as you have expressed interest in our
group's research. This is a quarterly newsletter of the papers,
presentations, datasets and news available from WING.

Come visit our website if you haven't been in a while:

http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg/

** Publications

* New Publications: In the last six months, we have been able to finish up a
few papers at different venues. We will have members going to JCDL,
SIGIR and ACL in July and early August. Please have a look if you're
interested in these topics:

[SIGIR] Jovian Lin, Kazunari Sugiyama, Min-Yen Kan and Tat-Seng Chua
(2013) Addressing Cold-Start in App Recommendation: Latent User Models
Constructed from Twitter Followers. To appear in the Proceedings of
Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR '13). 28 July-1
August. Dublin, Ireland.

Preprint available: http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg/publications/2013/fp093-lin.pdf

[ACL] Aobo Wang and Min-Yen Kan (2013) Mining Informal Language from
Chinese Microtext: Joint Word Recognition and Segmentation. To appear
in the Proceedings of Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics (ACL '13). 4-9 August. Sofia, Bulgaria.

Preprint available: http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg/publications/2013/acl2013.pdf

[JCDLa] Kazunari Sugiyama and Min-Yen Kan (2013) Exploiting Potential
Citation Papers in Scholarly Paper Recommendation. To appear in the
Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL '13).
22-26 July, Indianapolis, USA.

Preprint available:
http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg/publications/2013/fp036-sugiyama.pdf

[JCDLb] Huy Do Hoang Nhat, Muthu Kumar C., Philip S. Cho and Min-Yen
Kan (2013) Extracting and Matching Authors and Affiliations in
Scholarly Documents. To appear in the Proceedings of the Joint
Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL '13). 22-26 July, Indianapolis,
USA.

Preprint available: http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg/publications/2013/jcdl2013.pdf

[JCDLshort-a] Jesse Prabawa Gozali, Min-Yen Kan and Hari Sundaram
(2013) Constructing an Anonymous Dataset From the Personal Digital
Photo Libraries of Mac App Store Users. To appear in the Proceedings
of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL '13). 22-26 July,
Indianapolis, USA. Short Paper.

Preprint available:
http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg/publications/2013/jcdl2013a-short.pdf

[JCDLshort-b] Bamdad Bahrani and Min-Yen Kan (2013) Multimodal
Alignment of Scholarly Documents and Their Presentations. To appear in
the Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL
'13). 22-26 July, Indianapolis, USA. Short Paper.

Preprint available:
http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg/publications/2013/sp223-bahrani.pdf

** Other News

- Congratulations to Dr Zhao Jin, for defending his PhD thesis on
domain-specific information retrieval! Jin is now in the final stages
of depositing his thesis and will be continuing in our school as an
Instructor. He has already garnered very strong feedback from
students, who have admired his dedication to teaching.

We also congratulate Mr Bamdad Bahrani, who graduates from our unit
with a Masters of Computing by research. His work on Presentation to
Document Alignment will be featured in the upcoming JCDL conference
(see listing and preprint above). Bamdad has returned to Iran for
bigger and better things ahead. His MS thesis is also available below:

Bamdad Bahrani. (2013). Multimodal Alignment of Scholarly Documents
and Their Presentations. Master Thesis, National University of
Singapore.

Local archived version:
http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg/publications/theses/2013/bamdadBahraniThesis.pdf

- Hellos and Goodbyes: We welcome Dongyuan Lu, formerly of the Chinese
Academy of Science, who was with WING for a short period as a research
assistant and is now a research fellow with our group working under
CSIDM. She will be exploring social media footprints and analysis as
a link between CSIDM and our other international research center,
NExT. We welcome Eric Yulianto back from his UROP working on citation
function classification and Eugene Huang working on search engine
based prose plagiarism detection, both as project students.

Our research assistant and ParsCit maintainer Huy Hoang finished up
his duties in our group, graduating with his Masters and is now
working for Jayeson Solutions. Sudhanshu Khemka and Yiping Jin have
finished their undergraduate theses on GPU based language model IR and
Identifying and extracting scientific terms and definitions,
respectively. Here are the links to their theses:

[FYP] Sudhanshu Khemka (2013). Implementing a Language Model based
Information Retrieval System on the Graphics Processing Unit. Final
Year Undergraduate Dissertation. National University of Singapore

Local archived version:
http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg/publications/theses/2013/sudhanshuKhemkaThesis.pdf

[FYP] Jin Yiping (2013). Mining Definition of Terms in Scientific
Articles. Final Year Undergraduate Dissertation. National University
of Singapore

Local archived version:
http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg/publications/theses/2013/yipingJinThesis.pdf

- Min has been very busy this past semester with teaching
responsibilities for the school. He coordinated the School's Term
Project Showcase, a pilot event (now a regular event) that harnesses
all of the school's project classwork and shows it off to the local
industry folks with the NUS University Enterprise team in the mix.
Check out the 2012 Nov video here:

http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg/socProjectShowcase/2012_2013_Sem1/video.html

And the list of projects done by our students on the homepage:

http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg/socProjectShowcase/2012_2013_Sem2/
http://on.fb.me/11VBhiI

- The popular ParsCit software distribution will soon be adding new
functionality to better identify authors and their affiliations, as
part of our push to integrate our work from JCDL into our open source
package (see [JCDLb] above). You can use it to do more
bibliographic/bibliometric analyses in your own groups! Stay tuned or
check out the ParsCit home page (or @Github) over the next few months.

- Finally, check out the past 1/2 year's worth of CHIME Text Processing Seminars
(collective with other NLP/IR groups in NUS). Slides
from many of the talks are also archived on the site.

http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg/rchimetext/seminars/

* Interpreting Time In Text by Jun Ping Ng
* Graphical Modeling for Resource Categorization and Text-to-Construct
Linking in Domain-specific Information Retrieval by Jin Zhao
* Unsupervised Language Learning meets the Teaching Head by David M W Powers
* A New Grammar Induction Algorithm for Semantic Parsing by Peng Li
* Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation, Paraphrase Generation
and Summarization: A Linear-programming-based Analysis by Chang Liu
* Domain Adaptation and Training Data Acquisition in Wide-Coverage
Word Sense Disambiguation and its Application to Information Retrieval
by Zhi Zhong
* Understanding and Aggregating User-Generated Short Texts by Aixin Sun

- Alumni of WING: let us know any news items about you! Feel free to
drop by and say 'hello'!

Cheers,

Min (A/P Min-Yen KAN)
on behalf of WING members and staff