NAACL-HLT-2010 Workshop on Semantic Search (SemanticSearch 2010)
Keynote Speech
Bio: Dr. Ronald Kaplan is Chief Scientist and a Principal Researcher at the Powerset division of Microsoft Bing. He is also a Consulting Professor in the Linguistics Department at Stanford University. Before Powerset was acquired by Microsoft, he served as Powerset's Chief Technology Officer and Chief Science Officer. For many years prior to Powerset, he was a Fellow at the (Xerox) Palo Alto Research Center where he created and directed the Natural Language Theory and Technology research group. Ron and his colleagues are responsible for the theoretical framework and computational implementation at the core of Powerset's natural language technology.
Ron received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard University, where he investigated how explicit computational models of grammar could be embedded in models of human language performance. He has made many contributions to computational linguistics and linguistic theory. These include the notions of consumer-producer and active-chart parsing, the design of the theory of Lexical Functional Grammar and its computational implementation, a general architecture for the efficient management of linguistic ambiguity, and the mathematical, linguistic, and computational concepts that enable efficient finite-state solutions for many language processing problems.
He has provided linguistic technologies for commercial applications other than Powerset. He was Chief Scientist of Microlytics, a PARC spin-off, and delivered software that was incorporated into products sold by Microsoft, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Sony and other companies. Inxight Software (now part of SAP) was another PARC spin-off that commercialized his technology.
Ron is a past President of the Association for Computational Linguistics, a co-recipient of the 1992 Software System Award of the Association for Computing Machinery, and a Fellow of the ACM. He was also a Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He holds 35 patents in computational linguistics and related areas.
We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Ronald Kaplan from the Powerset division of Microsoft Bing will give an invited talk in our workshop!
Title: Semantics on the tail
Abstract: Traditional keyword search techniques produce quite satisfactory results for so-called head queries. These are queries that have been seen often enough--or whose keyword parts have been seen often enough--so that previous user behavior is an effective guide to relevant results. There is little headroom for semantic techniques to improve on head-query relevance. In contrast, traditional techniques do not work well for tail queries, low frequency or unique queries that typically express complex information needs and for which there are few if any good statistical signals. I suggest that a substantial proportion of tail queries can only be solved by linguistic and semantic analysis methods, and that good performance on tail queries, despite their relatively low frequency, will have a major impact on users' perception of search-engine quality. The tail is where the semantic search community should focus its efforts.