The main goal of my research is to improve our ability to mine useful knowledge from unstructured text. I am especially interested in information extraction of entities and relations from the Web, large-scale entity resolution, reasoning with uncertainty about databases and crowd-sourced human edits to those databases, understanding the connections between people and between organizations, topic models, expert finding, social network analysis, and mining the scientific research literature & community. Toward this end my group develops and employs various methods in statistical machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval and data mining---especially probabilistic approaches and graphical models. Among other projects we are currently (a) building digital libraries of scientific research papers and studying scientific community emergence, and (b) creating research systems to support open-access publishing and open peer review, and studying the sociology of alternative scientific peer review systems.
