School of Information Sciences

Jiang and Mishra to present natural language processing research at COLING16

Doctoral students Ming Jiang and Shubhanshu Mishra will present research papers at the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), which will be held December 11-16 in Osaka, Japan. The COLING conference, held every two years, is one of the top international conferences in the field of natural language processing and computational linguistics, which covers research topics such as question answering, text summarization, information extraction, discourse structure, and more. 

Jiang will present a paper coauthored with Assistant Professor Jana Diesner titled, "Says Who...? Identification of Expert versus Layman Critics’ Reviews of Documentary Films."

Abstract: We extend classic review mining work by building a binary classifier that predicts whether a review of a documentary film was written by an expert or a layman with 90.70% accuracy (F1 score), and compare the characteristics of the predicted classes. A variety of standard lexical and syntactic features was used for this supervised learning task. Our results suggest that experts write comparatively lengthier and more detailed reviews that feature more complex grammar and a higher diversity in their vocabulary. Layman reviews are more subjective and contextualized in peoples’ everyday lives. Our error analysis shows that laymen are about twice as likely to be mistaken as experts than vice versa. We argue that the type of author might be a useful new feature for improving the accuracy of predicting the rating, helpfulness and authenticity of reviews. Finally, the outcomes of this work might help researchers and practitioners in the field of impact assessment to gain a more fine-grained understanding of the perception of different types of media consumers and reviewers of a topic, genre or information product.

During the COLING16 workshop on noisy user-generated text (WNUT), Mishra will present a paper coauthored with Diesner titled, "Semi-supervised Named Entity Recognition in noisy-text." 

Abstract: Named entity recognition (NER) has played an immense role in improving information retrieval, text mining, and text based network construction. However, the most of the existing NER techniques are based on syntactically correct news corpus data, and hence don’t give good results on noisy data such as tweets because of issues like spelling errors, concept drifts, and few context words. In this paper, we describe our submission to the WNUT 2016 NER shared task, and also present an improvement over it using a semi-supervised approach. Our models are based on linear chain conditional random fields (CRFs), and use BIEOU NER chunking scheme, features based on word clusters and pre-trained distributed word representations; updated gazetteer features; global context predictions; and random feature dropout for up-sampling the training data. These approaches alleviate many issues related to NER on noisy data by allowing the meaning of new or rare tokens to be ingested into the system, while using existing training samples to improve the model. 

Diesner joined the iSchool faculty in 2012 and is a 2016 Dori J. Maynard Senior Fellow. Her research in social computing combines theories and methods from natural language processing, social network analysis, and machine learning. In her lab, she and her students develop and advance computational solutions that help people to measure and understand the interplay of information and socio-technical networks. They also bring these solutions into various application context, e.g. in the domain of impact assessment.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Student Spotlight: Daria Meshcheriakova

BSIS student Daria Meshcheriakova came to the iSchool with intention. Originally from Russia, where she lived for 17 years, Meshcheriakova moved to Chicago and attended Harold Washington Community College before transferring to the University of Illinois. Among potential universities, Illinois proved to be the best fit.

Daria Meshcheriakova

iSchool researchers present at ILA 2025

School faculty, staff, and students will present their research at the 2025 Illinois Library Association (ILA) Annual Conference, which will be held on October 14–16 in Rosemont. The theme of this year's conference is "You Belong Here."

iSchool researchers present at CSCW 2025

Several faculty, students, and recent grads will present their research at the 28th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2025), which will be held October 18–22 in Bergen, Norway. The online portion of the conference will be held on October 10. 

Get to know Jade Carthans, BSIS student

Jade Carthans is interested in how human-centered design, machine learning, and data analytics can come together to solve critical problems that impact organizations and individuals. She gained firsthand experience in these areas through internships with Microsoft and State Farm.

Jade Carthans

iSchool faculty and staff present at AISLE annual conference

Join the iSchool for the Association of Illinois School Library Educators (AISLE) annual conference, held October 5–7 at the I Hotel and Conference Center in Champaign, Illinois. The theme for the conference is “Libraries Build Connections.”

School of Information Sciences

501 E. Daniel St.

MC-493

Champaign, IL

61820-6211

Voice: (217) 333-3280

Fax: (217) 244-3302

Email: ischool@illinois.edu

Back to top