Elif Aktolga firstname at cs dot umass dott edu Department of Computer Science University of Massachusetts Room 366 140 Governors Drive Amherst, MA 01003

I am a PhD student in my fifth year in the CIIR lab, working with Prof. James Allan.

In Spring 2012 I am teaching CS 197U.

Here's a quick fun fact -- my surname is Turkish and means white (ak) helmet (tolga). I like helping out animals: I recently started fostering rabbits -- it's a very rewarding hobby!

I am interested in solving real world problems in Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing. I have worked in a broad spectrum of areas such as question answering, passage retrieval, language modeling, sentiment analysis, sparse queries, personalization, and outlier detection. I find it exciting to discover the underlying reasons to problems and to come up with realistic solutions to them. I enjoy diving into new, unexplored areas which no one has tackled before. The primary motivation and purpose of my work is to keep moving and learning new things, and making mistakes along the way to avoid them in the future.

Here is an information retrieval (IR) glossary which can be used by new IR students.

I spent the summer of 2011 at Yahoo! Search working with great researchers in the User Intent Analysis team.

I developed algorithms for the Misfit Mode in IBM Many Bills at the Visual Communication Lab of the IBM Watson Research Center during the summer of 2010. I am very happy to see my work go into production!

[6] Aktolga, E. and Allan, J., Reranking Search Results for Sparse Queries, CIKM 2011, pp. 173-183.

[5] Aktolga, E., Ros, I., Assogba, Y. and DiMicco, J., Many Bills: Visualizing the Anatomy of Congressional Legislation, Workshop on Scalable Integration of Analytics and Visualization, AAAI 2011, pp. 2-7.

[4] Aktolga, E., Ros, I. and Assogba, Y., Detecting Outlier Sections in US Congressional Legislation, SIGIR 2011, pp. 235-244.

[3] Aktolga, E., Allan, J. and Smith, D., Passage Reranking for Question Answering Using Syntactic Structures and Answer Types, ECIR 2011, pp. 617-628.

[2] Cartright, M., Aktolga, E. and Dalton, J., Characterizing the Subjectivity of Topics, SIGIR 2009, pp. 642-643.

[1] Aktolga, E., Cartright, M. and Allan, J., Cross-Document Cross-Lingual Coreference Retrieval, CIKM 2008, pp. 1359-1360.

1. Elif Aktolga. Pattern Matching Strategies for Peephole Optimisation. MRes Thesis, University of Sussex, UK, 2005. PDF, Slides


2. Elif Aktolga. A Java Planner for Blocksworld Problems. BSc Thesis, University of Osnabrueck, Germany, 2004. PDF

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