Abstract
In this talk, I will be sharing my (and my team’s) research journey of building summarization engines to produce various flavors of summaries. Starting from single document summarization, our experience of building multi-document summarization (MDS), query focused MDS, Update or Progressive summarization, more recently guided summarization, comparison summarization and personalized summarization systems can be seen as movement from Extraction based to Abstraction based summary generation. We have used variations of Relevance Based Language Model (RBLM) along with external knowledge sources in building these systems.I will also be sharing our experience of participating in Knowledge Base Population (KBP) track of Text Analysis Conference (TAC) and how our recent approach to this problem is influenced by the summarization technology. Since 2006, our team has consistently performed well and ranked as a top team in various tracks of DUC (Document Understanding Conference) and TAC (Text Analysis Conference) conferences conducted by NIST.
Biography
Vasudeva Varma is a faculty member at International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad Since 2002. His research interests include search (information retrieval), information extraction, information access, knowledge management, cloud computing and software engineering. He is heading Search and Information Extraction Lab and Software Engineering Research Lab at IIIT Hyderabad. He is also the chair of Post Graduate Programs since 2009.He published a book on Software Architecture (Pearson Education) and over seventy technical papers in journals and conferences. In 2004, he obtained young scientist award and grant from Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, for his proposal on personalized search engines. In 2007, he was given Research Faculty Award by AOL Labs.He was visiting professor at UPV, Valencia, Spain (Summer 2007), UBO, Bretagne, France (Summer 2009) and Language Technologies Institute, CMU, Pittsburgh, USA (Summer 2010)He obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Hyderabad in 1996. Prior to joining IIIT Hyderabad, he was the president of MediaCognition India Pvt. Ltd and Chief Architect at MediaCognition Inc. (Cupertino, CA). Earlier he was the director of Engineering and research at InfoDream Corporation, Santa Clara, CA. He also worked for Citicorp and Muze Inc. in New York as senior consultant.