9/16/2010 Jeff Unger, UI News Bureau
Written by Jeff Unger, UI News Bureau
University of Illinois computer science professor Dan Roth was among six Urbana campus faculty members recently recognized as University Scholars. The program recognizes excellence while helping to identify and retain the university’s most talented teachers, scholars and researchers.
Roth has made major conceptual and theoretical advances in artificial intelligence that have changed how computer scientists develop algorithms and programs for natural language understanding and how they think about computational modeling of learning and reasoning.
In his research, Roth has pursued several interrelated lines of work that span multiple aspects of this problem - from fundamental questions in learning and inference and how they interact, to the study of a range of natural language processing (NLP) problems, including multiple disambiguation problems, shallow parsing, semantic role labeling, co-reference, question answering and textual entailment, to large scale Natural Language Processing and Information Extraction system development - resulting in a number of software packages for NLP tools.
He is the director of the Department of Homeland Security Institute of Discrete Science Center for Multimodal Information Access & Synthesis Research at Illinois. Last year, Roth was elected a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the premier AI professional society, “for significant contributions to the foundations of machine learning and inference and to developing learning-centered solutions to natural language problems.”