Intelligent Systems and Applications

Natural language processing enables computers to understand and generate human languages. Agent technologies allow computers to act on behalf of humans. The great potentials of natural language processing and agent technologies lend themselves to a variety of interesting applications such as online learning, deception detection, ontology learning, natural language interface, machine translation, information retrieval, and financial application.

Deception Detection in Computer-mediated Communication

Deception detection has been a long-standing concern of law-enforcement agencies, employers, military, business negotiation, and individuals who are concerned about information quality. Computer-mediated communication introduces a new venue and challenges to the deception detection research. By integrating information technology and traditional sociological research, this research not only makes unique contributions to the deception detection, computer-mediated communication, and human computer interaction research but also creates new possibility of applying and developing information technologies.

Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery

Machine learning is a powerful technique for automatically discovering and acquiring knowledge from data (or information) sources ranging from free textual documents, semi-structured Web pages, to structured database. Evaluating and customizing the existing approaches for specific applications is equally as important as developing new learning approaches. In addition, incorporating knowledge base into machine learning approaches usually gains advantage over using either of the approach separately. Machine learning techniques have been applied to financial application, e-commerce, ontology development,  deception detection, and speech recognition.

The Semantic Web and Ontology

The Semantic Web will transform the Web from a data and communication space into a massive knowledge and service repository. On the one hand, the Semantic Web requires the support of semantic interoperability from ontology. On the other hand, the Semantic Web allows knowledge acquisition and service request and delivery in an unprecedentedly efficient way.

Web Services and Service Composition

With the advent of service-oriented computing and the widespread application of Web technologies, the Internet offers unprecedented opportunities to provide interoperable services to streamline supply chain, integrate intra-enterprise processes, and manage customer relationships. Web services standards have been widely accepted. Nonetheless, they are mostly based on syntactic information and are yet to support service discovery beyond keyword matching. Trust may play an indispensable role in selecting and composing services.

Information Retrieval

The ever-growing amount of information calls for efficient and effective information retrieval techniques. Despite different streams of research in this field, the benefit of language models to information retrieval has received wider recognition recently.

Natural Language Processing

Reference resolution remains as one of the challenging issues in natural language processing. The state of the art is adopting heuristics-based and/or knowledge-based approaches in resolving references. Statistical techniques have great potential in automatically resolving references in text. Summary generation from documents is a crucial technique for digital library and various other applications.

Many of the above research and techniques can be applied to knowledge management and digital library. In addition, most of the above applications can employ agent and collaborative technologies.