Background

Microsoft Research Asia organized a regional theme of “Web-Scale NLP” workshop in Feb 21-22, 2008 in the Asia-Pacific region to discuss the development of natural language processing (NLP) technology to meet requirements of large-scale applications, such as search engines for general domains and various vertical domains, advertising platforms, and e-commerce. In addition, over the past two years, MSRA has funded more than 20 projects in the Asia-Pacific region on the areas of machine translation, opinion analysis, next generation search engines, keyword extraction, ontology construction for specific domains, and knowledge acquisition of dialogue systems.

Topics of Interests

• Information extraction - Information extraction from web data such as blogs, news articles and web pages. The interested information includes a broad scope, but most important to our research are named entity and relation extraction.
• Information gisting of search results - For instance, automatic summarization of search results, opinion extraction/sentiment analysis/trend analysis for the applications of search engines.
• Machine translation and cross-lingual information retrieval
• Monolingual and multilingual online conversational agent or Chatbot

To promote the research in the NLP area, MSRA would like to build collaborations with professors from different universities. Here is a short introduction to our research work: MSRA Natural Language Computing Group