About

This is the web­site of Edgar Meij. I am cur­rently a post-doc at the Infor­ma­tion and Lan­guage Pro­cess­ing Sys­tems (ILPS) group of the Intel­li­gent Sys­tems Lab (ISLA) of the Infor­mat­ics Insti­tute of the Uni­ver­sity of Ams­ter­dam. Research projects I have been involved with include VL-e, CCCT, and Daeso. Cur­rently I’m work­ing on Dutch­Sem­Cor and LiMo­SINe, two projects that cen­ter around seman­tic search, seman­tic anno­ta­tions, and seman­tic infor­ma­tion access.

In 2010 I fin­ished my PhD under super­vi­sion of Maarten de Rijke. The topic of my PhD was lever­ag­ing con­cep­tual knowl­edge from ontolo­gies, the­sauri, tags, anno­ta­tions, or any other (struc­tured) knowl­edge source to enhance infor­ma­tion access. Infor­ma­tion access – in this sense – entails retrieval and nav­i­ga­tion of both doc­u­ments and knowl­edge. To this end I am using sta­tis­ti­cal lan­guage mod­el­ing tech­niques, which are nat­u­rally capa­ble of cap­tur­ing lan­guage use and which I employ to bridge the seman­tic gap between (a pri­ori defined) knowl­edge and (observed) lan­guage.¹ Using this frame­work I am able to com­pare queries, doc­u­ments, con­cepts, and rela­tions on a con­cep­tual level using lan­guage obser­va­tions. More infor­ma­tion can be found at http://phdthes.is/. In 2008 I spent some time in Barcelona, where I worked with Hugo Zaragoza and Peter Mika at Yahoo! Research. My research inter­ests include, but are not lim­ited by: (Seman­tic) Infor­ma­tion Retrieval, the Seman­tic Web, Lan­guage Mod­el­ing, Grid com­put­ing, and Data and Text Min­ing.

I’m pas­sion­ate about seman­tic search, infor­ma­tion retrieval, search engines, seman­tic web, machine learn­ing, infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion, and math­e­mat­ics and this web­site is my dig­i­tal busi­ness card as well as my per­sonal blog. I write on infor­ma­tion retrieval, seman­tic web tech­nolo­gies, research in gen­eral, and, on occa­sion, stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into one of these cat­e­gories. I also occa­sion­ally write about resources I dis­cover or find interesting.

1. Or, as Lud­wig Wittgen­stein said: “Mean­ing is use”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein [↩]