[Corpora-List] Ph.D. position: Focused Web Search

[Djoerd Hiemstra]

Open Ph.D. position: Focused Web Search

The Database Group of the University of Twente has an opening for a 
fully funded four-year PhD position in the Effort project. Effort is a 
joined project with the Information and Language Processing Group of the 
University of Amsterdam and is financed by the Netherlands Organisation 
for Scientific Research (NWO). The project will develop an approach for 
combining multiple representations of web information -- such as web 
directories and specialized search engines targeting a specific domain 
-- in a common framework based on statistical language models. In this 
framework it will be possible, for example, to derive models of the 
actual language-use of web pages to distinguish between arts, business, 
entertainment, education, etc. Similarly, it will be possible to derive 
models of the structure of web pages to distinguish between blogs, FAQs, 
personal web pages, cultural heritage pages, etc. The envisaged 
techniques have to be robust to all kinds of errors, ranging from 
imperfect information extraction techniques to imprecise queries 
formulated by the average web search engine user. An important aspect of 
any new technique in a web-setting is that they have to scale up to 
terabyte-sized collections. We plan to develop so-called parsimonious 
models to derive compact representations and to handle dependencies 
between representations of the data. The PhD student will be involved in 
designing, prototyping and evaluating such new search solutions. 
Successful prototypes should be made available as open source software.

Additional information can be obtained here:
* Official announcement by the University: 
http://www.utwente.nl/vacatures/vacatures_externe_werving/06-068-eng.doc
* Project web site hosted by the University of Amsterdam: 
http://www.science.uva.nl/~kamps/effort

-- 
Djoerd Hiemstra
University of Twente
Department of Computer Science
PO Box 217, 7500 AE
Enschede, The Netherlands

URL: www.cs.utwente.nl/~hiemstra
Tel: +31 53 4892335