The Future of Search: Understanding People and Pages
Speaker:  Danielle Van Dyke, Software Engineer - Google
April 18, 2008 ~ 3:00 PM ~ 214 Rekhi CS Hall  



Abstract
The Internet is an ever-expanding world of the daily postings of your neighbor's pet
peeves, pictures of everyone's nephew, and videos of cringe-worthy dancing. But at its
core the Internet is text, and the organization and categorization of these trillions
of words is what search engines do. By combining massive databases of text, machine
learning, and statistics, Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an important tool for
predicting meaning from the alphabet soup that is the world wide web.


The talk will include a brief introduction to statistical natural language processing,
the NLP behind several Google properties, interesting insights into how people search,
and a look at new applications of NLP models for search technologies in text and
beyond.