Cheng Xiang Zhai

Last updated
ChengXiang Zhai
Alma mater Nanjing University
Carnegie Mellon University
Scientific career
Fields Information Retrieval
Text Mining
Natural Language Processing
Machine Learning
Bioinformatics
Institutions University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Thesis Risk Minimization and Language Modeling in Text Retrieval
Doctoral advisor John D. Lafferty
Website czhai.cs.illinois.edu

ChengXiang Zhai is a computer scientist. He is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [1]

Contents

Biography

Zhai received the BS (1984), MS (1987, under Guoliang Zheng), and PhD (1990, under Jiafu Xu) in Computer Science from Nanjing University. He spent 1990 to 1993 working at Nanjing University's State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology. In 1993, he left for America to pursue a second PhD, this time at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) with David A. Evans. [2] Evans then left to spend more time with the company ClariTech. Zhai obtained from CMU a MS (1997) in computational linguistics and then started working with John Lafferty. He finally received from CMU a PhD in Language and Information Technologies in 2002. [3]

Since then, he has been an Assistant Professor (2002–2008), [4] Associate Professor (2008–2013), [5] Professor (2013–2018), and Donald Biggar Willett Professor (2018–) at the UIUC Department of Computer Science. [6] He also holds joint appointments with the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, Department of Statistics, and School of Information Sciences at UIUC. [3]

Awards

Personal

Zhai's son Alex has earned three medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad. [22] [23]

Related Research Articles

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Gerard A. "Gerry" Salton was a professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Salton was perhaps the leading computer scientist working in the field of information retrieval during his time, and "the father of Information Retrieval". His group at Cornell developed the SMART Information Retrieval System, which he initiated when he was at Harvard. It was the very first system to use the now popular vector space model for information retrieval.

A recommender system, or a recommendation system, is a subclass of information filtering system that provides suggestions for items that are most pertinent to a particular user. Recommender systems are particularly useful when an individual needs to choose an item from a potentially overwhelming number of items that a service may offer.

The Gerard Salton Award is presented by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) every three years to an individual who has made "significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval". SIGIR also co-sponsors the Vannevar Bush Award, for the best paper at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval</span> Subgroup of the Association for Computing Machinery

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XML retrieval, or XML information retrieval, is the content-based retrieval of documents structured with XML. As such it is used for computing relevance of XML documents.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shumin Zhai</span> Human–computer interaction research scientist

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Learned sparse retrieval or sparse neural search is an approach to text search which uses a sparse vector representation of queries and documents. It borrows techniques both from lexical bag-of-words and vector embedding algorithms, and is claimed to perform better than either alone. The best-known sparse neural search systems are SPLADE and its successor SPLADE v2. Others include DeepCT, uniCOIL, EPIC, DeepImpact, TILDE and TILDEv2, Sparta, SPLADE-max, and DistilSPLADE-max.

References

  1. ↑ Zhai, ChengXiang. "Home Page". Computer Science. Retrieved 19 November 2022.
  2. ↑ Zhai, ChengXiang (2002). "Risk minimization and language modeling in text retrieval" (PDF). Language Technology Institute — Faculty. Retrieved 24 November 2022.
  3. 1 2 Zhai, ChengXiang. "Bio". ChengXiang Zhai. Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  4. ↑ "Promotions recommended to be effective at the beginning of the 2008–09 academic year" (PDF). Board of Trustees. The Board of Trustees. Retrieved 24 November 2022.
  5. ↑ "Promotions recommended to be Effective at the beginning of the 2013–2014 academic year: Urbana-Champaign" (PDF). Board of Trustees. The Board of Trustees Office. Retrieved 24 November 2022.
  6. ↑ Zhai, ChengXiang (2003). "CV". ChengXiang Zhai — Home Page. Retrieved 24 November 2022.
  7. ↑ "Gerard Salton Awards". Awards. ACM SIGIR . Retrieved 19 November 2022.
  8. ↑ "SIGIR Academy". Awards. Retrieved 19 November 2022.
  9. ↑ Schmitt, Laura. "Zhai Inducted into Inaugural Class of New ACM Information Retrieval Academy". News. University of Illinois Department of Computer Science . Retrieved 19 November 2022.
  10. ↑ "ACM Recognizes 2017 Fellows for Making Transformative Contributions and Advancing Technology in the Digital Age". Association for Computing Machinery. December 11, 2017. Retrieved 2018-10-17.
  11. 1 2 "SIGIR Test of Time Awards Pre-2002 Recipients". Awards. ACM SIGIR. Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  12. 1 2 "ChengXiang Zhai". All Faculty. University of Illinois. Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  13. ↑ Zhai, ChengXiang; Lafferty, John (2001). "A study of smoothing methods for language models applied to Ad Hoc information retrieval". Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval. pp. 334–342. doi:10.1145/383952.384019. ISBN   1581133316. S2CID   5793143 . Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  14. ↑ Zhai, ChengXiang; Lafferty, John (2004). "A study of smoothing methods for language models applied to information retrieval". ACM Transactions on Information Systems. 22 (2): 179–214. doi:10.1145/984321.984322. S2CID   207670589 . Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  15. ↑ Lafferty, John; Zhai, Chengxiang (2001). "Document language models, query models, and risk minimization for information retrieval". Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval. pp. 111–119. doi:10.1145/383952.383970. ISBN   1581133316. S2CID   53234319 . Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  16. ↑ "SIGIR Test of Time Awards". Awards. ACM SIGIR. Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  17. ↑ Zhai, ChengXiang; Cohen, William W.; Lafferty, John (2003). "Beyond independent relevance". Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval. pp. 10–17. doi:10.1145/860435.860440. ISBN   9781581136463. S2CID   52855966 . Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  18. ↑ "Recipients". Distinguished Members. ACM . Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  19. ↑ "The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers: Recipient Details: ChengXIang Zhai". National Science Foundation. NSF . Retrieved 19 November 2022.
  20. ↑ "Best Paper Awards". Awards. ACM SIGIR. Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  21. ↑ Fang, Hui; Tao, Tao; Zhai, ChengXiang (2004). "A formal study of information retrieval heuristics". Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval. pp. 49–56. doi:10.1145/1008992.1009004. ISBN   1581138814. S2CID   15200693 . Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  22. ↑ Kline, Greg (21 August 2006). "Uni student makes it count in Mathematical Olympiad". Illini football news. The News-Gazette. Retrieved 24 November 2022.
  23. ↑ "Alex (Lin) Zhai". International Mathematical Olympiad. Retrieved 24 November 2022.


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