Seminario MAVIR: Doug Oard Imprimir

Seminario MAVIR

Doug Oard: Nobody Writes Letters Anymore: Helping people make sense of historically significant email collections

miércoles 10 de junio 2009 a las 12h00

 

Lugar de celebración

Salón de Grados (planta baja)
ETSI Industriales
c/ Juan del Rosal, 12
28040 Madrid 

Cómo llegar y planos

Emisión en directo por streaming

 

Resumen

The archivist’s dilemma is that in a world with vastly more information being created, less of what we should keep may reach the archive in forms that we know how to manage. Much of present archival practice rests on four key facts: important records have generally been written on paper, paper records are (reasonably) persistent, paper records require some level of manual description, and the costs of description and preservation necessitate appraisal and selection. We are, however, moving toward a world in which records that are never committed to paper may prove to be ephemeral, digital objects can be (at least to some
extent) self-describing, and the economics of appraisal and retention might therefore reverse.

Many projects are now working on reliably getting important digital records into the future, so in this talk I’ll
focus on what I as the natural next step: helping to at least partially automate description. In order to illustrate how this might be done, I’ll describe joint work with Tamer Elsayed to automatically resolve the identity of people who are mentioned ambiguously (e.g., just by first name) in a collection of email from a failed corporation (Enron). Our results indicate that, at least for people who are well represented in the collection, we can use a generative model to guess the right identity more than 80% of the time. I’ll conclude the talk with a few
remarks on our next directions for techniques, evaluation, and additional types of collections to which similar ideas might be applied.

 

Horario

12h00

 

Sobre el ponente

Douglas Oard is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, with joint appointments in the College of Information Studies and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, and his research interests center around the use of emerging technologies to support information seeking by end users. Dr. Oard’s recent work has focused on interactive techniques for cross-language information retrieval and techniques for search and sense-making in conversational media. Additional information is available at Oard's homepage.

 

Video

[Seminario MAVIR] Doug Oard: Nobody writes letters anymore.

 

Materiales

Presentación: Nobody Writes Letters Anymore: Helping people make sense of historically significant email collections