I’m flying by the seat of my pants like the rest of you

Welcome to my personal website. I’m an Assistant Professor at the School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences, University of Prince Edward Island. My current research interests lie in information retrieval and ontologies for computational literary studies. Contact me, if you’re interested in kicking the tires on a potential collaboration in either of these areas.

Text analysis

I am curious to explain the success of TF-IDF-like heuristics from a statistical significance testing lens and apply this understanding to develop novel term weighting schemes that help improve state-of-the-art document retrieval, classification, and summarization methods.

The Literary Theme Ontology

This line of research is focused on developing a literary thematic knowledgebase to underpin computational analyses in literary studies. Literary themes, as major topics that summarize stories, make for a natural organizing hub when it comes to the classification and retrieval of works of fiction. This research grew out of my earlier work in complex network-based bioinformatics. Inspired by the Gene Ontology knowledgebase resource, I developed the Literary Theme Ontology (LTO), the first ever controlled vocabulary of literary themes that are hierarchically arranged into a directed acyclic graph structure. The LTO forms the core knowledgebase for a collaborative fiction document annotation GitHub repository. The next phase of this research is to use project data to train machine learning algorithms to automatically annotate works of fiction with literary themes.