This two-part dissertation centers on a re-examination of the role of book indexes in information retrieval research on full-text digital book collections in digital libraries. Early research focused on information retrieval and book indexes (in addition to other parts of books) in the 2000s when the Google Books corpus was first released to the…

In the big data era, we have witnessed the explosion of scholarly literature. This explosion has imposed challenges to the retrieval of bibliographic information. Retrieval of intended bibliographic information has become challenging due to the overwhelming search results returned by bibliographic information retrieval systems for given input…

Social networks have become more complex, in particular considering the fact that elements in social networks are not only abstract topological nodes and links, but contain rich social attributes and reflecting diverse social relationships. For example, in a co-authorship social network in a scientific community, nodes in the social network, which…

Graphs are widely used to model structures and relationships of objects in various scientific and commercial fields. Chemical molecules, proteins, malware system-call dependencies and three-dimensional mechanical parts are all modeled as graphs. In this dissertation, we propose to mine and index those graph data to enable fast and scalable search.…

This thesis work is mainly focused on two problems related to improving accessibility of information graphics for visually impaired users. The first problem is automated analysis of information graphics for information extraction and the second problem is multi-modal representations for accessibility. Information graphics are graphical…

Combinatorial scientific computing plays an important enabling role in computational science, particularly in high performance scientific computing. In this thesis, we will describe our work on optimizing matrix-vector multiplication using combinatorial techniques. Our research has focused on two different problems in combinatorial scientific…

Much recent work in natural language processing treats linguistic analysis as an inference problem over graphs. This development opens up useful connections between machine learning, graph theory, and linguistics. The first part of this dissertation formulates syntactic dependency parsing as a dynamic Markov random field with the novel…

The variety and complexity of potentially-related data resources available for querying--webpages, databases, data warehouses--has been growing ever more rapidly. There is a growing need to pose integrative queries "across" multiple such sources, exploiting foreign keys and other means of interlinking data to merge information from diverse…

This dissertation explores the use of geometric and graphical models for a variety of information search and filtering applications. These models serve to provide an intuitive understanding of the problem domains and as well as computational efficiencies to our solution approaches. We begin by considering a search and rescue scenario where both…