Boris Katz

Infobox_Scientist
name = Boris Katz


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birth_place = Chişinău, Moldova
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field = Computer Science
work_institution = MIT
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known_for = START
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Boris Katz was born in Chişinău, Moldova. He was able to get out of USSR with the help of a U.S. senator, before the end of the cold war. Currently, he is a Principal Research Scientist (Computer Scientist) at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and head of the Laboratory's InfoLab Group. His research interests include natural language processing and understanding, machine learning and intelligent information access.

Over the last several years Boris Katz has been developing the START natural language system that allows the user to access various types of information using English.

The START system responds to natural language queries with answers in text, pictures, and other media. START's sentence-level natural language parsing relies on a number of mechanisms to help it process the huge, diverse resources available on the World Wide Web. Blitz, a hybrid heuristic- and corpus-based natural language preprocessor, enables START to integrate a large and ever-changing lexicon of proper names, by using heuristic rules and precompiled tables of symbols to preprocess various highly regular and fixed expressions into lexical tokens. LaMeTH, a content-based system for extracting information from HTML documents, assists START by providing a uniform method of accessing information on the Web in real time. These mechanisms have considerably improved START's ability to analyze real-world sentences and answer queries through expansion of its lexicon and integration of Web resources.

Click [http://start.csail.mit.edu here] if you want to ask START questions in English.

Past Works

* [http://www.ai.sri.com/project/SHAKEN A Knowledge Entry System for Subject Matter Experts] The goal of SHAKEN project is to enable subject matter experts, without any assistance from AI technologists, to assemble the models of processes and mechanisms so that questions about them can be answered by declarative inference and simulation.

* [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=991700&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=24069727&CFTOKEN=28106328 Exploiting lexical regularities in designing natural language systems]

* [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=315639&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=24069727&CFTOKEN=28106328 Word sense disambiguation for information retrieval]

* [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=315518&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=24069727&CFTOKEN=28106328 HIKE (HPKB integrated knowledge environment)- a query interface and integrated knowledge environment for HPKB]

* [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=860445&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=24069727&CFTOKEN=28106328 Quantitative evaluation of passage retrieval algorithms for question answering]

* [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=604091&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=24069727&CFTOKEN=28106328 Sticky notes for the semantic web]

* [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=956886&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=24069727&CFTOKEN=28106328 Question answering from the web using knowledge annotation and knowledge mining techniques]

* [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=766119&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=24069727&CFTOKEN=28106328 The role of context in question answering systems]

External links

* [http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/boris/boris.html Boris Katz Web Page]

* [http://www.csail.mit.edu/ Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory]

* Massachusetts Institute of Technology