Text Analysis and Machine Learning

Description:
Text Analysis and Machine Learning cover the research field known as Knowledge-based Systems. Here are some of the questions it tackles: knowing if we have sufficient knowledge to describe and solve a given task; representing knowledge in a manner adequate to the task in which it is to be used; acquiring and learning knowledge from examples; analyzing and understanding a variety of knowledge sources, particularly in the form of documents and texts expressed in languages such as English; and planning  and organizing knowledge into actionable units (agents) that can tackle problems autonomously.

Applications:
In addition to the applications mentioned above, this research area has applications in a variety of other areas (e.g., medicine, computer security, management, digital games, or fashion). For instance, we work on a system that will assist the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario emergency room personnel in predicting the severity of asthma attacks in patients suffering from this condition. In another application, we investigate inter-relationships between different body measurements to better understand the typical consumer, from a virtual tailor’s perspective – it turns out that different sets of body measurements are useful to characterize each clothing size.

PROFESSORS:

• Inkpen, Diana
  Natural language processing, lexical semantics, information retrieval, speech recognition and synthesis, and intelligent agents for the Semantic Web.

• Japkowicz, Nathalie
  Machine learning, data mining, performance evaluation methods for machine learning, computer security, environmental safety

• Matwin, Stan
  Machine learning, data mining and text mining, applications, knowledge-based systems

• Szpakowicz, Stan
  Natural language processing, text summarization, lexical resources, sentiment analysis.

• Tran, Thomas T.
  Intelligent agents, multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning, electronic commerce, trust and reputation modeling, recommendation systems, architecture for mobile e-business

• Turcotte, Marcel
  Applications of machine learning in bioinformatics, algorithm design

• Viktor, Herna
  Long-term preservation of software dependent data; data mining of anthropometric databases containing relational, 2D and 3D data; 3D protein structure retrieval and similarity search