My work focuses on the analysis of informal user-generated content on social media platforms. I am particularly interested in problems related to understanding what people write (named entity identification), how they write (characterizing word usages) and why they write (user intents, sentiment, opinion expression mining). I am also interested in studying the effects of these micro-level variables of user-generated content (along with the properties of the people and the network generating it) on emerging social phenomena on the Web. My doctoral thesis research is supported by the following grants, primarily based on my work:
IBM UIMA Innovation Award 2007
Microsoft's Beyond Search - Semantic Computing and Internet Economics Award, 2008
I recently presented a summary of my doctoral research as an invited Keynote at the Social Data on the Web Workshop, collocated with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2009. Slides can be downloaded from here .
Bio
I am a doctoral student in the Computer Science dept. at the Kno.e.sis Research Center in Wright State University and was previously with the LSDIS Lab at the University of Georgia. I moved to Ohio when my advisor Amit Sheth took up the LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar position in Jan 2007. I got my bachelors in Management Studies with a specialization in Computer Science from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, (BITS-Pilani) in India.