Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory

Information A collection of facts, relations or events from which conclusions may be drawn. Knowledge that has been gathered or received.

Extraction Obtaining materials in concentrated, usable form from a dilluted, unusable source.

Synthesis The combining of separate elements or substances to form a coherent whole. Reasoning from the general to the particular; logical deduction.

Laboratory An organization performing scientific experimentation and research.

IESL aims to dramatically increase our ability to mine actionable knowledge from unstructured text. We are especially interested in information extraction from the Web, understanding the connections between people and between organizations, expert finding, social network analysis, and mining the scientific literature and community. We develop and employ various methods in statistical machine learning, natural language processing and information retrieval. We tend toward probabilistic approaches, graphical models, and Bayesian methods.

IESL Group, 2016 Retreat