James Allan

James Allan photo
James Allan

My research spans topics in information retrieval, the technology that underlies search engines and other systems that provide search and organization of large volumes of text. I am generally interested in "information organization" to support a person's or a group’s making sense of and managing information encountered on a daily basis, including ways to process, organize, retrieve, and browse unstructured text information.  I am particularly interested in using language tools to support critical thinking by readers.  My other major research activities at the moment look at ways to recognize contention and misinformation in text, to support effective interactive search techniques, and to build and evaluate more effective search models on large collections of within- and cross-language text.