Research Area

Text analysis and machine learning

Text analysis and machine learning covers the research field known as knowledge-based systems. Some of the issues it tackles include 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.

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, fashion). For instance, we work on a system that will assist Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario emergency room staff to predict the severity of asthma attacks in patients. In another application, we investigate inter-relationships between different body measurements to better understand the typical consumer, from a virtual tailor’s perspective.