Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

With the ever-increasing large amount of digital information available, the need for advanced Information Retrieval (IR) and text analysis systems increases. This wealth of digital information presents a major data-analysis challenge for us. How to manipulate, analyze and understand large quantities of complex data becomes extremely important.Our primary goal of this proposed research is to develop more advanced and novel tools in information technology to search for the most relevant information and discover significant patterns from very large unstructured data. In particular, (1) we will establish an Information Retrieval and Text Analysis Research Lab (IRLab); (2) we will build a context-aware search engine to filter out unnecessary information and implement semantic text analysis tools to effectively extract key elements from free-form unstructured data for improving retrieval performance.The proposed research will lead to more effective information retrieval applications in many domains such as medical health care, Web search, business enterprise search and bioinformatics, which will bring broad benefits to society and people from both academia and industry.