Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Thursday, 27 May 2010, 16:15
Conference Room, Building C7 4

Creative Information Retrieval: From Cliques to Categories and Beyond

Information retrieval (IR) is an effective mechanism for text management that has received widespread adoption in the world at large. But it is not a particularly creative mechanism, in the sense of creating new conceptual structures or reorganizing existing ones to pull in documents that describe, in novel and inventive ways, a users information needs. Since language is a dynamic and highly creative medium of expression, the concepts that one seeks will therefore represent a moving target for IR systems. In this talk we explore the role of creative language processing in Information Retrieval, and consider those situations where there is a non-literal (rather than wholly literal, or literally synonymous) relationship between the elements of a query and the target strings it is designed to match. We argue that only by thinking creatively can an IR system effectively retrieve documents that express themselves creatively. To this end, we draw on our recent work in NLP and Cognitive Science to describe an approach to text retrieval that employs an arsenal of non-literal operators to mediate between a users information needs and creative articulations of that information.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Caroline Sporleder.