HONG KONG BAPTIST UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF SCIENCE

Department of Computer Science Seminar
2007 Series

Towards a Belief Revision Based Adaptive Information Retrieval System

Dr. Raymond Y.K. Lau
City University of Hong Kong

Date: December 14, 2007 (Friday)
Time: 9:30 - 10:30 am
Venue: RRS905, Sir Run Run Shaw Building, Ho Sin Hang Campus

Abstract
This talk is based on a paper accepted to ACM Transactions on Information Systems. In an adaptive information retrieval (IR) setting, the information seekers' beliefs about which terms are relevant, or non-relevant, will naturally fluctuate. It is argued that the theory of belief revision can be used to model adaptive IR. More specifically, belief revision logic provides a rich representation scheme to formalize retrieval contexts so as to disambiguate vague user queries. Accordingly, belief revision logic is applied to develop an effective user profiling mechanism which can take into account information seekers' changing information needs. On the other hand, information retrieval contexts can be extracted by means of the information flow text mining method so as to realize a highly autonomous adaptive IR system. The extra bonus of a belief-based adaptive IR model is that its retrieval behavior is more predictable and explanatory. Our initial experiments show that the belief-based adaptive IR system is as effective as a classical adaptive IR system. To our best knowledge, this is the first successful implementation and evaluation of a logic-based adaptive IR model which can efficiently process large IR collections.

Biography
Dr. Raymond Lau has been the programme leader of the Bachelor of Business Administration (Honors) in Electronic Commerce degree programme offered by the Department of Information Systems of City University of Hong Kong since 2005. He holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from Queensland University of Technology, a M.S. in Business Systems Analysis and Design from City University, and a M.AppSc. in Information Studies from Charles Sturt University. He has worked at the academia and the ICT industry for twenty years. His research work is published in renowned journals such as ACM Transactions on Information Systems, Journal of Management Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Journal of Information Sciences, International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logic, Web Intelligence and Agent Systems, etc. His research interests include Information Retrieval, Text Mining, and Agent-Mediated e-Commerce. He is the technical editor of the Journal of Asian Information Management. He is also the workshop co-chair on Service-Oriented Knowledge Management at the 2007 IEEE International Conference on e-Business Systems Engineering and the workshop co-chair on Web Personalization and Recommender Systems at the 2007 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence.

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http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/v1/?page=seminars&id=72&lang=tc
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