Research Interests

Prof. Fang’s research interests focus on text information management, especially in the areas of information retrieval (also known as search engine technology), text mining and bioinformatics. The main goal is to overcome the information overload problem and help users access and make use of the various kinds of text information, such as web pages, emails, instant messages, literature, blogs, etc. The information is being continuously produced everywhere in the world in every possible way. Such a huge amount of information overwhelms users, and poses significant challenges in text information management. Clearly, it becomes increasingly important to manage large amounts of information so that users can access useful information and discover interesting knowledge efficiently and effectively. Prof. Fang is studying a novel task aware information retrieval framework, which allows users to precisely formulate their queries in the context of information tasks and systematically exploit the task information in the retrieval decision. She is also interested in developing optimal retrieval functions and understanding what hinders the performance of existing retrieval models. Moreover, she is also actively collaborating with domain experts including journalists and biologists and developing effective techniques and systems that could help them discover interesting knowledge from domain-specific information.