Current Topics in Information Access

This is a research seminar focusing on current topics in information access. We study four or five main themes throughout the course of the semester. Each class meeting focuses around the discussion of one or more research papers. Most meetings begin with a discussion of background information (led by Prof. Hearst), followed by a discussion of the findings of the paper(s) (led by one or more students), following by general discussion relating these findings to what has already been discussed and to implications for new research.

Themes under consideration are:

• Integration of users' personal information within various information access tasks.
• Incorporation of AI-style knowledge structure into information access systems.
• Use of hyperlinks and collective user information in improving web structure.
• The relationship between pre-defined categories and automatically generated structure (like clusters) in information access interfaces.
• Supporting the dynamic process of information access in the user interface. Text data mining. Visualization of large text collections.
• Students' suggestions.

These options are discussed during the first class meeting.