Speaker: Rada Mihalcea (https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~mihalcea/)

Title: TextRank: Bringing Order Into Texts (Revisited)

Abstract:
TextRank is a framework for the application of graph-based ranking algorithms to structures derived from text, which demonstrates how the synergy between graph-theoretical algorithms and graph-based text representations can result in efficient unsupervised methods for several natural language processing tasks. The original TextRank framework was proposed more than ten years ago, when it was found to be effective for several text processing applications, including word sense disambiguation, extractive summarization, and keyphrase extraction. Since then, TextRank has continued to be used in numerous language processing applications, oftentimes leading to performance comparable to state-of-the-art algorithms, despite being a light unsupervised methodology. In this talk, I will revisit TextRank and talk about some of its successful applications over the recent years.

Bio:
Rada Mihalcea is the Janice M. Jenkins Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab. Her research interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical semantics, multilingual natural language processing, and computational social sciences. She serves or has served on the editorial boards of the Journals of Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluations, Natural Language Engineering, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, and  Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She was a program co-chair for EMNLP 2009 and ACL 2011, and a general chair for NAACL 2015 and *SEM 2019. She currently serves as ACL President. She is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers awarded by President Obama (2009), an ACM Fellow (2019) and a AAAI Fellow (2021). In 2013, she was made an honorary citizen of her hometown of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.