Dr Xiaoying Sharon Gao

BE, ME Hebei, Ph.D Melb

Position	Senior Lecturer
Research Interests	Artificial Intelligence
Office	CO442 - Postal Address
Phone	+64 4 463 5978
Email	Xiaoying.Gao@ecs.vuw.ac.nz

Teaching

Teaching in 2010: COMP 102 COMP 307 COMP 423

Biography

I got my BE and ME from China in 1990 and 1992, and received a Ph.D from The University of Melbourne, Australia in 2000. I have been working here in Victoria University since 2000. Most of my research projects are in the area of Web Intelligence, which is a new and very challenging research area. My current research aims to develop new models and new algorithms that improve Web search, web data extraction and web page classification and clustering. Here is a list of my projects:

1. Improving clustering and evaluation. The goal is to Improve clustering-based data extraction by identifying new features and to develop new evaluation criteria and standard testing data sets for the evaluation of web data extraction systems.

2. Semantics-guided Web Page Clustering. The goal of this project is to introduce a new model and a new algorithm that adds semantics to clustering. The main idea is to estimate the semantic similarity between words and use the similarity to guide the clustering algorithm to generate meaningful and relevant clusters.

3. Clustering Web usage data. The amount of the Web usage data is huge and the data has complex structures and is non-numerical. Clustering this new type of data is very challenging and innovative.

4. Query refinement by identifying the key aspect in an original query. Our previous research has shown promise in automatically query refinement by identifying the under represented aspects. This project will expand the idea and extend our method by introducing the concept of “the key aspect” and use it to refine queries.

5. Ontology learning using Google distance and Google search results. Our previous research shows that we can use Google distance to learn a vocabulary for a “term”. This idea can be generalized and applied to ontology learning. It would be interesting to find out how this can help with web search.

More information can be found in my homepage and the Artificial Intelligence group page.