Google has granted an award in the odd amount of $107,112 to Rada Mihalcea, an assistant professor at the University of North Texas, for her work in developing algorithms of text extraction. Google's grant comes from the Google Print initiative. Mihalcea is working exactly in Google's wheelhouse, her research proejcts involving semantic parsing and "word sense disambiguation." I never thought, in my blogging career, that I would type the phrase, "word sense disambiguation." But I often feel I could use some word sense disambiguation myself. Anyway, last December Evan Martin, a search quality engineer at Google, said this about Mihalcea: "Her work outperforms the current best-performing algorithms, even existing supervised algorithms while this approach is unsupervised. Awesome."
