ERDC 2014 - Workshop on Entity Recognition and Disambiguation Challenge

The Entity Recognition and Disambiguation Workshop will be organized as a challenge, where participants submit working systems that identify the entities mentioned in text. The challenge will have two tracks, focusing on long and short texts. All submissions will be evaluated on shared datasets; part of the data will be withheld, to be used for the final evaluation of all submitted systems to determine the winners. Each participating team will be offered a spot at the workshop to present their system.
David Carmel is a Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! lab at Haifa. David's research is focused on search and content quality analysis in community question answering sites, query performance prediction, vertical search, and text mining. David has published more than 80 papers in IR and Web journals and conferences, and serves on the editorial board of the IR journal and as a senior PC member or an Area Chair of many conferences (SIGIR, WWW, WSDM. CIKM). He organized a number of workshops and taught several tutorials at SIGIR, and WWW. David earned his PhD in Computer Science from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in 1997.
Ming-Wei Chang is a researcher at Microsoft Research. His research interests are in machine learning and natural language understanding. He currently focuses on using large-scale structured and unstructured data for semantic understanding. Specially, he is interested in developing algorithms for entity linking that are effective for short and noisy text
Evgeniy Gabrilovich is a senior staff research scientist at Google, where he works on knowledge discovery from the web. Prior to joining Google in 2012, he was a director of research and head of the natural language processing and information retrieval group at Yahoo! Research. Evgeniy is an ACM Distinguished Scientist (2012), and is a recipient of the 2010 Karen Sparck Jones Award for his contributions to natural language processing and information retrieval.
Bo-June (Paul) Hsu is a researcher in the Internet Services Research Center at Microsoft Research. Since graduating from MIT in 2009, he has been collaborating with various researchers and engineers across Microsoft to apply research methodologies to solve real-world product challenges. In particular, he has contributed various data structures and algorithms to Bing's query auto-completion system, enabling it to compute the top completions with spelling correction or input method conversion from among billions of queries.
Kuansan Wang is a Principal Researcher and manager of the Internet Service Research Center (ISRC) at Microsoft Research (MSR), Redmond. He joined MSR Speech Technology Group in 1998, conducting research in the areas of speech recognition, spoken language understanding and multimodal dialog. From 2004 to 2007, he was a software architect at speech product and business incubation groups, helping create and commercialize a wide range of award winning speech products for Microsoft. Since 2007, he has been with MSR ISRC conducting research on web search and machine learning. Dr. Wang is an active member in both academic and industrial communities. He has published more than 50 peered review articles and 140 patents. He is also the author of 6 ISO and 3 W3C standards in the area of speech processing and voice communications.