Organization of Web Information
CS728, Spring 2011

2011/01/04 Course intro

• CS635, latest offering.
• Intro slides.
• The pipeline from extraction to disambiguation and resolution to indexing and search.
• Landscape of information extraction: source regularity, sophistication of target structure.

2011/01/07

Postponed by order on account of TechFest.

2011/01/11

• Overview of Inductive Logic Programming, FOIL.
• Rule based NE taggers: , .
• Lecture slides.

2011/01/14

• IBM tutorial on rule-based information extraction.
• Hidden Markov models for NE tagging.
• Symbols to features, MEMM.
• Conditional random fields intro.

2011/01/18

• CRFs: details of feature encoding and dynamic programs.
• Max-margin training of CRFs.
• Need for supporting more general graphs.

2011/01/21

• Loss-augmented inference examples.
• Modeling non-local effects: context-free grammars, distant shared tokens, long segments.
• Segment CRFs, dictionary features.
• PCFGs .

2011/01/25

• Skip-chain CRFs .
• Factor graphs, approximate inference via belief propagation (tutorial).
• Lecture slides.
• Voted perceptrons.

2011/01/28

• Collin's use of voted perceptron for CRF training.
• Multiple sequence alignment: hardness, heuristics.
• Tree alignment .

2011/02/01

• Guest lecture by TA, on GATE and UIMA.
• Additional reference: Case study in wrapper generation ---

2011/02/04

• Guest lecture by Vinayak Borkar on Hyracks.

2011/02/08

• Forms of type and entity catalogs.
• Overview of open-domain vs. closed-domain entity recognition.
• Hearst patterns .
• KnowItAll (also see CPANKOW, ).
• Named relation recognition.
• DIPRE .

2011/02/11

• Snowball .
• Relation clues: surface tokens, POS tags, parse tree, dependency graph
• Feature, rule, (path) kernel-based methods .
• String kernel tutorial.
• Open-domain binary relation harvesting: TextRunner.

2011/02/15

• TextRunner: also see , .
• Entity disambiguation:
• SemTag and Seeker
• Wikify!

2011/02/18

• Tree kernels
• Cucerzan's leave-one-out
• Milne and Witten's anchor method

2011/02/26

Midterm exam, 5:30--8pm. Check the solutions for bugs.

2011/03/01

• Embedding entities in category/type space.
• CSAW.
• Annotating tables with relations, types, entities.
• Overview of coreference resolution.

2011/03/04

• Pairwise decisions and correlation clustering
• Active learning committees for coreference resolution.
• Attribute-mediated dependences .

2011/03/08

• Attribute-mediated dependences, continued.
• Lecture slides.
• Overview of bridging the gap between structured and unstructured search systems.

2011/03/11

• The gap between structured and unstructured search systems.
• Data representation, user's knowledge of schema, query language choices, response unit.
• BANKS group Steiner trees, spreading activation.

2011/03/15

• WHIRL .
• XQuery , XIRQL and ELIXIR.

2011/03/18

Lecture postponed.

2011/03/22

• Personalized PageRank, definition .
• Applications: TeXQuery, XRank, ObjectRank.

2011/03/23

• NetRank --- learning weights for edge types.

2011/03/25

• NetRank --- learning circulations.
• Random walk with restarts --- low rank decomposition .
• HubRank --- indexing for spreading activation.

2011/03/29

• Centerpiece subgraphs .
• Descendant of answer type in proximity to keyword matches: IR4QA
• Extending to multiple answer types:
• Other graph query mechanisms: SPARQL, NAGA.

2011/04/01

Lecture postponed (WWW 2011).

2011/04/05

• Guest lecture by Ashwin Machanavajjhala from Yahoo!: A holistic approach to Web scale information extraction.

2011/04/08

• Learning lexical proximity: IR4QA.
• Additional reading:

2011/04/12

• NAGA's corpus, query and response models
• NAGA's ranking semantics based on probabilistic IR

2011/04/15

• Evidence aggregation in entity search
• Laplacian smoothing of snippet scores QinLZWXL2008RankingRelationalObjects
• Graphical model and mincut
• Ranking considerations in EntityRank
• Cascade of two logistic regression models
• Ranking quantity responses QCQ.

2011/04/18

• Indexing considerations in entity and relation search
• Nextword and SIP index
• Contextual indices SSQ .
• Detour to set expansion: Bayesian sets, WangC2007SEAL.

2011/04/19

Office hours for clarification and discussion.