Carnegie Mellon’s Jamie Callan to present on search engine support

Jamie Callan, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute and School of Information Systems and Management, will present “Search Engine Support for Software Applications.” His presentation is part of the Brown Bag Lecture Series at the School of Information Studies (iSchool) and will occur at 1 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 23, in the Katzer Room, 346 Hinds Hall. A reception will follow.

Question answering, computer-assisted language learning, text mining and other software applications that use a full-search engine to find information in a large text corpus are becoming common. This use of text search has different characteristics than the ad hoc, interactive search that information retrieval research typically studies. Often, software applications require a more sophisticated document representation than a simple “bag of words.”

A variety of language analysis tools and knowledge resources are emerging to provide more sophisticated representation and reasoning, however it is not yet clear how to integrate them into search engines in a general way. This talk discusses some of the problems encountered when extending search engines to support other software applications.

Callan’s research and teaching focuses on text-based information retrieval—primarily search engine architectures, federated search of groups of search engines, adaptive information filtering, text mining and information retrieval for educational applications.

Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon, Callan served as a research assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and worked for seven years as a software engineer for Digital Equipment Corp. Callan holds a bachelor’s degree in applications of computer science at the University of Connecticut, and a master’s degree in computer and information science and Ph.D. in computer science, both from the University of Massachusetts.