Dekang Lin

Timeline

1. 1985–1992

   Training in computing

   Lin earned a Tsinghua computer science degree in 1985 and an Alberta computing science doctorate in 1992. His interests include parsing, statistical language learning and question answering.

2. 1997–1998

   Dependencies and word similarity

   Lin published work on using syntactic dependencies to resolve word sense ambiguity in 1997. In 1998 he published work on retrieving and clustering similar words, an information-theoretic definition of similarity and evaluation of the MINIPAR dependency parser.

3. 2001

   Discovering inference rules

   Lin and Patrick Pantel published DIRT, a system for discovering inference rules from text, and a related question answering paper. They also studied methods for inducing semantic classes. Their work connects statistical language analysis with the acquisition of information usable in reasoning.

4. 2002–2003

   Concepts and multilingual retrieval

   With Pantel, Lin published work on word sense discovery, concept discovery and document clustering in 2002. With Bonnie Dorr and Gina-Anne Levow, he published a Chinese–English verb lexicon study for cross-language information retrieval in 2003.