Doctor Alan F. Smeaton

Position: Senior Lecturer in Computing

Current Research Base:
The information retrieval research group I lead has 2 PhD students, 3 M.Sc. students, one post- doctoral consultant and myself. We are currently working in the following areas:

• information filtering - applying NLP techniques to the intelligent filtering of USENET news
• articles (see BORGES project below) and to newspaper articles from the Irish Times
• large-scale information retrieval - we are part of the TREC benchmarking exercise to evaluate the effectiveness of IR techniques on large (2Gbyte+) text databases
• multimedia indexing/retrieval - we are developing techniques to index and retrieve multimedia images based on NLP techniques applied to descriptive captions
• intelligent retrieval from hypertexts - we have developed techniques to generate guided tours from hypertexts and are currently applying these techniques to multimedia courseware

Experience in Previous Research Projects:
I have worked as a researcher on the ESPRIT I project MINSTREL in the area of office information models. I led the Dublin City University team in the ESPRIT II SIMPR project which applied NLP techniques to information retrieval. This led to funding from the VALUE program to prototype our work on a large collection of texts. I have just started to receive funding from the LIBRARIES program to apply information filtering techniques, based on NLP techniques, to USENET news articles. This project finishes July 1996. I have received funding from industry and national research bodies for work in multimedia indexing/retrieval and hypertext/hypermedia. I have worked for the Commission evaluating projects or drafting workplans for the LRE, Language Engineering, MLAP and Information Engineering work programmes and have been involved in TREC since it started 4 years ago.

References:
[1] A.F. Smeaton.
Progress in the application of natural language prosessing to information retrieval tasks. The Computer Journal, 35(3):268--278, 1992.
[2] P. Sheridan and A.F. Smeaton.
The application of morpho-syntactic language processing to effective phrase matching. Information Processing and Management, 28(3):349--369, 1992.
[3] A.F. Smeaton.
Information retrieval and hypertext: Competing technologies or complimentary access methods. Journal of Information Systems, 2(1):1--13, 1992.
[4] C. Guinan and A.F. Smeaton.
Information retrieval from hypertext using dynamically planned guided tours. In D. Lucarella et al., editor, Proceedings of ECHT'92 (European Conference on Hypertext), pages 122--130, Milan, Italy, 1992.
[5] A.F. Smeaton.
Using natural language processing in information retrieval tasks: An overview of achievements to date. Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, 55:220-- 238, 1994.