中央研究院 資訊科學研究所

The emergence of social networking sites has given rise to a huge amount of user-generated contents (UGCs). Through these social sites, users ask questions, pose comments, provide answers, and tweet about their recent pursuits. The contents accumulated over the years have evolved into a huge unstructured source of knowledge. The ability to organize this knowledge will help to unlock the rich user-generated contents to better understand the current information needs of users as well as to support trend and sentiment analysis, retrieval and question answering. To accomplish this, our research aims to automatically mine an initial prototype hierarchy of the question topic by leveraging on the domain knowledge encoded in the Web, Wikipedia or product manuals. We then develop a prototype-hierarchy based clustering framework that utilizes the category structure information of initial prototype hierarchy as well as the distribution of relevant UGCs around the topic to perform information organization based on a multi-criterion optimization function. We apply this framework to organize the UGCs in both question-answering sites and forums. This talk discusses our research to transform the unstructured and evolving UGCs into knowledge structures.

Chua Tat-Seng the KITHC Chair Professor at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore (NUS). He was the Acting and Founding Dean of the School of Computing during 1998-2000. He joined NUS in 1983, and spent three years as a research staff member at the Institute of Systems Science (now I²R) in the late 1980s. Dr Chua's main research interest is in multimedia information retrieval, in particular, on the analysis, retrieval and question-answering (QA) of text and image/video information. He is currently working on several multi-million-dollar projects: interactive media search, local contextual search, and real-time live media search. His group participates regularly in TREC-QA and TRECVID video retrieval evaluations.

Dr Chua has organized and served as program committee member of numerous international conferences in the areas of computer graphics, multimedia and text processing. He is the conference co-chair of ACM Multimedia 2005, CIVR (Conference on Image and Video Retrieval) 2005, and ACM SIGIR 2008. He serves in the editorial boards of: ACM Transactions of Information Systems (ACM), Foundation and Trends in Information Retrieval (NOW), The Visual Computer (Springer Verlag), and Multimedia Tools and Applications (Kluwer). He sits in the steering committee of ICMR (International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval), Computer Graphics International, and Multimedia Modeling conference series; and serves as member of International Review Panels of two large-scale research projects in Europe.