Zaiqing Nie (聂再清) 

      Lead Researcher

      Web Search & Mining

      Microsoft Research Asia

　

      4F, Beijing Sigma Center

      No. 49, Zhichun Road, Haidian District

      Beijing, P.R.China, 100080

 

       Email: znie AT microsoft DOT com

       Tel: (86-10) 5896-3309

       Fax: (86-10) 8809-7306


Zaiqing Nie joined Web Search & Mining Group in April 2004. He graduated in May 2004 with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Arizona State University. He received his Master of Engineering degree in Computer Applications from Tsinghua University in 1998, and his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science and Technology from Tsinghua University in 1996. His research interests include Web Search, Data Mining, Information Retrieval, and Machine Learning.
 

News

Check Out Libra Academic Search,  Renlifang Guanxi Search (人立方关系搜索) (Language: Chinese)，EntityCube Project

·         Mining Personal Relationships

EntityCube is an English-language version of a wildly popular Chinese project called Renlifang. In Mandarin, "Renlifang" means "three people." The nomenclature is intentional, because the project, and its EntityCube manifestation, is all about demarcating the relationships among a group of people.  "EntityCube automatically summarizes relevant information about people," Nie explains. "For example, ...

·         Search Objective Gets a Refined Approach

With Object-Level Vertical Search, a new technique devised by Microsoft Research Asia, getting accurate, precise search results will become much more accessible ...

More news and blogs about Windows Live Product Search

 

Recent Publications

 

2009

·         Closing the Loop in Webpage Understanding

Chunyu Yang, Yong Cao, Zaiqing Nie, Jie Zhou, Ji-Rong Wen

To appear in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE).

 

·         Query Result Clustering for Object-level Search
Jongwuk Lee, Seung-won Hwang, Zaiqing Nie, Ji-Rong Wen

To appear in the Proceedings of SIGKDD 2009.

 

·         StatSnowball: a Statistical Approach to Extracting Entity Relationships

Jun Zhu, Zaiqing Nie, Xiaojiang Liu, Bo Zhang, Ji-Rong Wen.

To appear in the Proceedings of the 18th international World Wide Web conference (WWW 2009).

 

2008

·         WebPage Understanding: Beyond Page-Level Search

Zaiqing Nie, Ji-Rong Wen, and Wei-Ying Ma.

SIGMOD Record, December 2008 (Vol. 37, No. 4).  Special Issue on Managing Information Extraction.

 

·         Scalable Community Discovery on Textual Data with Relations.

Huajing Li, Zaiqing Nie, Wang-Chien Lee, C. Lee Giles, and Ji-Rong Wen

CIKM 2008 (1203-1212).

 

·         Dynamic Hierarchical Markov Random Fields for Integrated Web Data Extraction

Jun Zhu, Zaiqing Nie, Bo Zhang, Ji-Rong Wen.

In the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), 9(Jul):1583--1614, 2008.

 

2007

·         Webpage Understanding: An Integrated Approach

Jun Zhu, Zaiqing Nie, Ji-Rong Wen, Bo Zhang, Hsiao-Wuen Hon.

To appear in the Proceedings of SIGKDD 2007.

 

·         Name Disambiguation Using Web Connection
Yiming Lu, Zaiqing Nie, Taoyuan Cheng, Ying Gao, Ji-Rong Wen.

To appear in the AAAI-07 Workshop on Information Integration on the Web (IIWeb 2007).

 

Jun Zhu, Zaiqing Nie, Bo Zhang, Ji-Rong Wen.

To appear in the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Machine Learning  (ICML 2007).

 

·         Web Object Retrieval

Zaiqing Nie, Yunxiao Ma, Shuming Shi, Ji-Rong Wen, Wei-Ying Ma.

In the Proceedings of the 16th international World Wide Web conference (WWW 2007).

 

·         Object-Level Vertical Search

Zaiqing Nie, Ji-Rong Wen, Wei-Ying Ma.

In the Third Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR 2007, research paper).

 

2006

·         Simultaneous Record Detection and Attribute Labeling in Web Data Extraction

Jun Zhu, Zaiqing Nie, Ji-Rong Wen, Bo Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma.

In the 12th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining  (SIGKDD 2006, full paper).

 

Honghua(Kathy) Dai, Zaiqing Nie, Lee Wang, Lingzhi Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen, Ying Li.

In Proceedings of the 15th international World Wide Web conference (WWW 2006, industry track).

  

·         Extracting Objects from the Web

Zaiqing Nie, Fei Wu, Ji-Rong Wen, Wei-Ying Ma.

In the 22nd International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2006, poster paper).

 

2005

Jun Zhu, Zaiqing Nie, Ji-Rong Wen, Bo Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma.

In the 22nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2005).
 

·         Object-Level Ranking: Bringing Order to Web Objects.
Zaiqing Nie, Yuanzhi Zhang, Ji-Rong Wen, and Wei-Ying Ma.

In Proceedings of the 14th international World Wide Web conference (WWW 2005),

May 10-14, 2005, in Chiba, Japan.

·         Effectively mining and using coverage and overlap statistics for data integration.
Zaiqing Nie, Subbarao Kambhampati and Ullas Nambiar.
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE). Vol. 17, No. 5, May 2005.

2004

·         A Frequency-based Approach for Mining Coverage Statistics in Data Integration.
Zaiqing Nie and Subbarao Kambhampati
In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2004).
 

·         Optimizing Recursive Information Gathering Plans in EMERAC.
S. Kambhampati, E. Lambrecht, U. Nambiar, Z. Nie and G. Senthil.
Journal of Intelligent Information Systems. Volume 22, Number 2, March 2004.

2001 - 2003

·         BibFinder/StatMiner: Effectively Mining and Using Coverage and Overlap Statistics in Data Integration (system demo). 
Zaiqing Nie, Subbarao Kambhampati and Thomas Hernandez.
In Proceeding of the 29th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2003).
 

·         Frequency-Based Coverage Statistics Mining for Data Integration.
Zaiqing Nie and Subbarao Kambhampati.
IJCAI 2003 Workshop on Information Integration on the Web.

·         Mining Coverage Statistics for Websource Selection in a Mediator.
Z.Nie, U. Nambiar, S. Lakshmi and S. Kambhampati.
ASU CSE TR 02-009 (A short version of this paper appears in Proceedings of CIKM 2002).
 

·         Scalable Delivery of Streaming Data on the Internet through Customizable Approximate Caching.
Zaiqing Nie and Wen-Syan Li. NEC Technical Report, 2002.
 

·         Mining Source Coverage Statistics for Data Integration.
Zaiqing Nie, Subbarao Kambhampati, Ullas Nambiar and Sreelakshmi Vaddi.
In 3rd ACM International Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM), Atlanta, Georgia, USA, November 2001.
 

·         Joint optimization of cost and coverage of query plans in data integration.
Zaiqing Nie and Subbarao Kambhampati.
In Proceedings of the 10th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) , Atlanta, Georgia, November 2001.
 

·         AltAlt: Combining Graphplan and Heuristic State Search.
Biplav Srivastava, XuanLong Nguyen, Subbarao Kambhampati, Minh B. Do, Ullas Nambiar, Zaiqing Nie, Romeo Nigenda, Terry Zimmerman.
In AI Magazine, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Fall 2001.
 

 

Professional Service

 

Systems

EntityCube: An Entity Search and Summarization Engine

EntityCube is an entity search and summarization engine, which automatically summarizes the Web for the long tail, not just celebrities! The Chinese name of the project is called Renlifang.

The need for collecting and understanding Web information about a real-world entity (such as a person or a product) currently is fulfilled manually through search engines. But the information about a single entity might appear in thousands of Web pages. Even if a search engine could find all the relevant Web pages about an entity, the user would need to sift through all the pages to get a complete view of the entity. EntityCube is an entity search and summarization system that efficiently generates summaries of Web entities from billions of crawled Web pages. The summarized information is used to build an object-level search engine about people, locations, and organizations and explore their relationships.

Specifically, EntityCube automatically generates:

·  A biography page for a person.

·  A social-network graph for a person.

·  A shortest-relationship path between two people.

·  All titles of a person that are found on the Web.

 

Renlifang Guanxi Search (人立方关系搜索):

Renlifang is a new-generation of search engine, one that enables users to navigate through search result and explore relationships between entities.   In Renlifang, users can submit a query about any people, locations, and organizations and then explore their relationships. From more than 1 billion Chinese web pages, Renlifang employs automatic algorithms to extract entity information and detects relationships, covering a spectrum of everyday individuals and well-known people, locations, or organizations. At this point Renlifang only serves in Chinese language domain.

Libra Academic Search

By using the latest object level technologies, we have created the Libra academic search engine to facilitate the exchange of ideas and communications between academic communities.  A user entering search queries in Libra can retrieve relevant information on academic papers, scientists, conferences, journals, and interest groups thus generates more accurate, relevant, and efficient results in comparison to document-level ranking.  Features of this search engine include the ability to:

l        Find top scientists, conferences, and journals in a specific field;

l        Witness the growth and evolution of research communities;

l        Locate top research papers;

l        Identify rising stars or hot topics in your field

Web Product Extractor

We extract meta-data about real-world products from every product page on the Web by using a single information extraction model. Specifically, for each crawled Web page, we first use a classifier to decide whether it is a product page and then extract the name, image, price and description of each product from detected product pages.

BibFinder

BibFinder is a free computer science bibliography meta-search engine to dynamic integrate search results from multiple online bibliography data sources. It integrates CSB, DBLP, ACM DL, ACM Guide, Network Bibliography, ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore, CiteSeer and Google Scholar.

 

Work Experiences

Research Links

Web Search and Mining Group

ASU' Yochan Database Group
YOCHAN