Biographical sketches of authors

Robert Mack   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: robertmack@us.ibm.com). Dr. Mack is manager of the Information Design and Access Group. He joined IBM Research in 1981 in a postdoctoral position, and then as a research staff member, after completing his Ph.D. in cognitive and experimental psychology at The University of Michigan in 1981. He received a B.A. degree in physics from Oakland University and an M.A. degree in experimental psychology from Michigan State University. He has worked on a wide range of software systems, both as a user interface and human-computer interaction specialist, and as a project lead for prototype systems and middleware for applications relating to digital libraries, digital video archive and search, and knowledge portals. All of these projects have involved collaboration with and technology transfer to the IBM Software Group or IBM Global Services. Dr. Mack and his team are currently working on projects related to using user task context to enhance the search function, and applying text mining to support knowledge discovery in the life sciences.

Yael Ravin   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: ravin@us.ibm.com). Dr. Ravin is manager of the Knowledge Structures Group. She received a B.A. degree in English literature and philosophy from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (cum laude), an M.A. degree in teaching English as a second language from Teachers' College, Columbia University, and a Ph.D. degree in linguistics from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Since then, she has been working as a research staff member at the T. J. Watson Research Center on a variety of natural language processing and information retrieval projects. Dr. Ravin created the IBM named-entity recognizer and led its development and transfer into a product (Intelligent Miner for Text). Other projects include word-sense disambiguation, linguistic support for IR, and relation extraction from text. Currently, she manages a question-answering project.

Roy J. Byrd   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: roybyrd@us.ibm.com). Mr. Byrd joined IBM in 1968 and has done development and research on programming languages and compilers, database query systems, object-oriented programming languages, natural language processing, information retrieval, and text analysis. From 1969 to 1974, he participated in the development of several IBM products incorporating compilers and interpreters for the BASIC and PL/I programming languages. From 1974 to 1976, he worked in the former IBM Advanced Systems Development Division on the EQUAL natural language query system for relational databases. He joined the T. J. Watson Research Center in 1976. Until 1981, he worked on the System for Business Automation project, which produced the Query-by-Example product, and which built a message-passing object-oriented programming system based on actor theory. Since 1982, he has done computational linguistics research on the analysis and construction of lexicons for natural language processing and on techniques for text analysis in large document collections. Mr. Byrd manages the Text Analysis and Language Engineering group in the Knowledge Management Technologies department at IBM Research. The group has contributed to several IBM products, including DB2^® Text Extender and Intelligent Miner for Text. His current research interests include information extraction from large text corpora, using fast natural language processing techniques. He received his B.A. degree in theory and composition of music from Yale University in 1967 and is a Ph.D. candidate in linguistics at New York University.