[标题] From Search Engine to Answer Engine

[主讲] Dr. Dekang Lin, MISingularity

[时间] 10:00-11:30, 19th April

[地点] Room 106, ICST Building

[内容] Question-answering aims to provide the direct answers to users questions, instead of a list of documents that may contain the answers. In recent years, search engines have been transforming themselves into answer engines, by responding to increasingly larger proportions of users' queries (e.g., "when is the next world cup" and "fastest bird") with direct answers ("2018" and "peregrine falcon", respectively). In this talk, I will give an overview of the approaches to question answering, and discuss the natural language processing and machine learning challenges in answer engines.

[简历] Dekang Lin is a co-founder of MISingularity, a Beijing-based startup for mobile search and assistant. He was a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google from 2004 to 2016, where he led a team of researchers and engineers to build a question-answerer in Google search.

Before joining Google, Dekang Lin was a full professor of Computer Science at University of Alberta. He authored 90 papers with over 12000 citations. He was elected as Fellow of Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2012 and served as the program co-chair and general chair for ACL-2002 and ACL-2011 respectively.