Professor Barbara Di Eugenio receives funding from Motorola to develop intelligent summarizer

The NLP laboratory(Dr. Barbara Di Eugenio, director) has obtained new funding from the "Motorola University Partnership in Research" program for "Intelligent Aggregation for Mobile Search." The project focuses on developing resources and algorithms to perform aggregation, i.e., summarization of long lists of concepts. The problem is important for effective mobile search, since long lists can overwhelm small displays, are difficult to remember when spoken, and are difficult to navigate on a small device. The problem is challenging, since it touches on unsolved research issues. First, we will need to develop new algorithms to generate meaningful groupings of the items that appear on long lists; in many cases, such as aggregating email messages, the possible dimensions are too numerous to define a priori and must be dynamically determined. Second, mobile search cannot be conceived of as a sequence of isolated queries: a user will follow up to an answer from the mobile search engine with further requests. Hence, the system must be able to address new requests from the user that will refer to the entities dynamically created by the system.