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Kevyn Collins-Thompson |
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Researcher Fax: +1-425-936-7329 Email: kevynct AT microsoft . com |
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Kevyn Collins-Thompson is a Researcher in the Context, Learning, and User Experience for Search group at Microsoft Research (Redmond).
My primary research interests involve the application of machine learning to information organization and retrieval problems.
One area of special interest is development of robust algorithms for IR that can effectively balance risk and reward, a research direction that I introduced in my PhD thesis. This work exploits connections with computational finance and develops new models, algorithms, and evaluation methods that account for risk. For example, it shows how the reliability of current query expansion methods can be greatly improved by treating query expansion as a constrained convex optimization problem that accounts for the risk and reward of joint term selection.
I'm also interested in text mining, statistical language modeling, natural language processing, computer-assisted language learning, and how the brain acquires language skills.
My Ph.D. is from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where my advisor was Jamie Callan. I was a member of the Language Technologies Institute.K. Collins-Thompson. Optimization methods for query model estimation: applying portfolio theory to mitigate risk in information retrieval. CMU DIR Group Technical Report 2007-09-03. Abstract
M. Heilman, K. Collins-Thompson, J. Callan, and M. Eskenazi. Classroom success of an Intelligent Tutoring System for lexical practice and reading comprehension. Proceedings of Interspeech 2006. Pittsburgh, U.S.A. abstract
K. Collins-Thompson and J. Callan. Query expansion using random walk models. Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'05). ACM. Bremen, Germany. (pdf)
K. Collins-Thompson, J. Callan. Predicting reading difficulty with statistical language models. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Vol. 56, No. 13, 1448-1462.
K. Collins-Thompson, P. Ogilvie and J. Callan. Initial results with structured queries and language models on half a terabyte of text. Proceedings of TREC 2004, National Institute of Standards and Technology, special publication. (pdf)
K. Collins-Thompson and J. Callan. A language modeling approach to predicting reading difficulty. Proceedings of HLT / NAACL 2004, Boston, USA, May 2004. (pdf)
K. Collins-Thompson and J. Callan. Information retrieval for language tutoring: an overview of the REAP project (poster description), Proceedings of SIGIR 2004, Sheffield, UK. July 2004. (pdf)
K. Collins-Thompson, E. Terra, J. Callan, and C. Clarke. The effect of document retrieval quality on factoid question-answering performance (poster description), Proceedings of SIGIR 2004, Sheffield, UK. July 2004. (pdf)
J. Zhang, A. Toth, K. Collins-Thompson, and A. Black. Prominence prediction for super-sentential prosodic modeling based on a new database, ISCA Synthesis Workshop, Pittsburgh, USA, June 2004.
E. Nyberg, T. Mitamura, J. Callan, J. Carbonell, R. Frederking, K. Collins-Thompson, L. Hiyakumoto, Y. Huang, C. Huttenhower, S. Judy, J. Ko, A. Kupsc, L. V. Lita, V. Pedro, D. Svoboda, and B. Van Durme. (2004.) "The JAVELIN question-answering system at TREC 2003: A multi-strategy approach with dynamic planning." Proceedings of the 2003 Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2003). National Institute of Standards and Technology, special publication. (pdf)
U.S. Patent 6,735,335. M. Liu, K. Collins-Thompson, D. Lawton. Method and apparatus for discriminating between documents in batch scanned document files. May 2004.
U.S. Patent 6,687,697. K. Collins-Thompson, C. Schweizer. System and method for improved string matching under noisy channel conditions. Feb. 2004.
K. Collins-Thompson, P. Ogilvie, Y. Zhang, and J. Callan. Information filtering, novelty detection, and named-page finding. In Proceedings of the 2002 Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2002). National Institute of Standards and Technology, special publication. 107 - 118.(pdf)
E. Nyberg, T. Mitamura, J. Carbonell, J. Callan, K. Collins-Thompson, K. Czuba, M. Duggan, L. Hiyakumoto, N. Hu, Y. Huang, J. Ko, L. Lita, S. Murtagh, V. Pedro, D. Svoboda. The JAVELIN Question-Answering System. In Proceedings of TREC 2002. NIST, special publication. 128 - 137.
K. Collins-Thompson, R. Nickolov (2002). A clustering-based algorithm for automatic document separation. Proceedings of the SIGIR 2002 Workshop on Information Retrieval and OCR, Tampere, Finland. (pdf)
K. Collins-Thompson, C. Schweizer and S. T. Dumais (2001). Improved string matching under noisy channel conditions. Proceedings of CIKM 2001. Atlanta, USA. 357-364 (pdf)
Context, Learning, and User Experience for Search Group's home page.
DBLP Bibliography