Big Thinker Andrew McCallum Discusses the Construction of Probabilistic Databases for Large-scale Knowledge Bases
Yahoo Labs is honored to have hosted Dr. Andrew McCallum on Tuesday for a quarterly #BigThinkers seminar. In his talk, Dr. McCallum, Professor and Director of the Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory in the School of Computer Science at University of Massachusetts Amherst, discusses a wealth of research regarding the construction of probabilistic databases for large-scale knowledge bases.
McCallum contends that building large-scale knowledge bases enables reasoning about the underlying entities and relations in the world rather than irregular text spread across the web. For this reason, he says, knowledge base construction and maintenance have been of increasing interest in both industry and academia. During his talk, McCallum describes scalable machine learning methods for managing uncertainty throughout the information extraction and integration pipeline, parallel-distributed entity resolution, and an exciting new way to represent and align large, rich schema semantics based on matrix factorization and vector embeddings.
The event was broadcast live on our labs.yahoo.com homepage and viewers had the opportunity to ask questions and comment on our Twitter stream @YahooLabs as well as our Facebook page.
If you are interested in learning about probabilistic databases for large-scale knowledge base construction, you can view Dr. McCallum's full presentation here: