People, clouds, and interaction for information access

Abstract

Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) currently has nineteen research groups that cover various areas in computer science. The Web InTelligence (WIT) Group, led by Chin-Yew Lin, is a recent spin-off from the Natural Language Computing Group, and tackles problems in sentiment analysis, expert and social search, social question answering and summarisation, user intent/activity recognition and prediction, assisting inarticulate users, and information access evaluation. In this talk, I will try to illustrate current strategies and future visions of the WIT group by discussing human-human interaction, computer-computer interaction, human-computer interaction and "evaluation evolution," each in turn.