Master in Language Technologies
Language Technologies Institute
SCS (School of Computer Science)
Carnegie Mellon University

Office: 3612 Newell Simon Hall
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

My advisor is Professor Jamie Callan and here is our DIRGroup.

Introduction

I am a Master's student in language technologies (MLT) in LTI, CMU. My research interests are in text information retrieval and applications of natural language understanding. My current focus is on designing smooth interfaces of search engines (e.g. Lemur), for Human Language Technology (HLT) applications to fully exploit the discourse/semantic/syntactic structures of natural language texts which traditional SEs are blind to. We develop and use the structured retrieval abilities of the Indri search engine of the Lemur project, to support HLT applications including Question Answering, Intelligent Tutoring and XML retrieval. The First problem here is within the set of all possible structured queries allowed by Indri, how to pick the right one, and what kinds of structures help the different retrieval tasks. Second, given a well-formulated structured query, how to perform the approximate matching.

Research Interests (+ interesting courses)

• Using Structures (annotations, parse trees, etc.) to help Retrieval, Retrieving Structures in text, XML Retrieval, Search Engine Indexing
• Text Retrieval (Sentence level novelty detection, probabilistic models, language modeling, formalizing the notion of Relevance) and Web Search IR 11-741, Advanced IR seminar 11-743
• Natural Language Processing (syntactical and semantical theories of natural language understanding, statistical or rule-based) Algorithms in NLP 11-711, Language and Statistics I 11-761, Language and Statistics II 11-762, Grammar Formalisms 11-722 (There are not so many courses about how to get the semantics -- e.g. event-patient-agent -- out of natural language texts, and this is a great basic course of that.)
• Data Mining & Database Multimedia Databases and Data Mining 15-826 (In the real world: many Bursty distributions, power laws, fractals.. ideas about graph mining and analyzing real world data.)
• Machine Learning (with its relation to language and intelligence, mostly applying/devising ML tools for NLP) Advanced ML seminar 11-745

Working

• 2006.3-2006.6 Internship at Sogou.com, a Chinese search engine company, worked to improve the relevance ranking of web documents.

Teaching

• Spring 2004, Teaching Assistant for Data Structure (CS 0024-0074), by Prof. Junhui Deng
• Fall 2003, Teaching Assistant for Artificial Intelligence, by Prof. Shaoping Ma

Latest!

• 2008-02-20 -> Jasmine staying in Pittsburgh and lives happily ever after with Le!
• 2007-01--- -> 02--- Jasmine coming to Pittsburgh!
• 2006-08-15 -> 08-17 Graduate School Orientation, see my space for photos.
• 2006-08-01 Leaving for LTI, CMU (Pittsburgh) for my yet another Masters degree... Hopefully to continue on PhD.
• 2006-06-17 -> 06-18 Going to Jasmine's home (our home in Shijiazhuang).
• 2006-06-13 -> 06-17 Honeymoon: Yalong Bay, Sanya. This will be the hotel.
• 2006-03-31 Married to Jasmine! (Take a look if you could, as she is much better than me in expressing the marriage excitement and love experience. Certainly I am at least as excited and happy as she feels.)

Some Interesting Resources

• Topical Words: Top 100 popular words in low grade level ranges (5-8 in K-12), and popular words in topics such as Arts, Business, Computer, Health, Science, Society, Sports, Music, MovieAndTheater, Biology, Fitness, Religion, Politics, LawAndCrime, History etc. Starts from 3rd column.
• Kid sites list (a fairly complete one): This is a list of about 1,800 websites that are of low reading difficulty level. Not everyone of them is very good, but there are many interesting ones. A byproduct of research (the first number is a popularity score, whether the site has many low difficulty pages). Boys and girls, Enjoy!

Other Interests

• Probability; Statistics, Stochastic Processes, Measure Theory, Functional Analysis
• Differential Manifolds, Topology
• Logic and Linguisitics (especially interested, it's also related to my research work), Category Theory
• Philosophy, Psychology, Buddhism, Aesthetics, Abstract theories of human intellects
• Literature(reading), Classical Music(Bethoven, Chopin), Movies
• Volleyball(LTI won Championship!), Badminton, Tennis, Swimming, Skiing (a lot fun), Parachuting, Camping(Pity! Never tried these two before)
• Cuisine(still improving...), Houseology(figuring out ways to keep housework simple while keeping the house neat -- Once I read about this terminology on the web so I borrowed it here.)

Contact Me

Links

Friends

Last Update: 2008-01-28