Research summary
It goes without saying that to grasp the meaning of a text, we need to understand the language in which it is written. But we also need to be able to make sense of the information described and to use this understanding in web searches and dialogue. This requires the ability to reason about the information using both common and specialized knowledge.
Dr. Jian-Yun Nie, Canada Research Chair in Natural Language Information Processing and Applications, is developing methods of understanding and representing the contents of texts so they can be communicated and accessed effectively in various applications. He and his research team are incorporating relevant knowledge into text understanding, and applying it in various domains for social good. They aim to improve current practices in information retrieval and web search engines.