An assistant professor at the University of North Texas working on a project to find information from scanned texts has scored a grant from the search advertising company.
Football isn’t the only activity that brings big dollars to Texas college campuses. But college professors have to do a lot more scrambling than a running back on Saturdays to get the kind of funding they need for research.
Google has made it easier for one researcher, Rada Mihalcea, a University of North Texas assistant professor of computer science and engineering. North Texas e-News said her project, “Finding Important Information in Unstructured Text: Algorithms for Keyphrase and Sentence Extraction,” earned the grant from Google.
The article describes her work; it’s obvious why Google finds it valuable:
Mihalcea is working on automatic methods for extracting important information from books stored in electronic format. This could take the form of back-of-the-book indexes or succinct summaries, and could eventually lead to better ways of accessing the information in the books.
An expert in natural language processing and information retrieval, Mihalcea’s research project addresses the construction of indexes and summaries for very large documents.
Her research dovetails with Google’s efforts to make books and scanned texts available via its Print and Library projects. Mihalcea’s research must show some tremendous promise to Google, which has proven it does a good job of search relevancy over the past seven years.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
