Intro

Hugo has been a researcher at the frontier of Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Search (or Information Retrieval) for over ten years.

Hugo Zaragoza is the founding CEO of Websays, a company dedicated to the analysis of conversations and opinions online.

At Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Hugo lead the Natural Language Retrieval group from 2006 to 2011. Research dealt mainly with applications of natural language processing to web search applications, in particular relevance ranking and algorithms for search over large and heavily annotated collections (our version of "semantic search"). Some examples of the work of his group can be seen in the public demos Correlator, Quest and Time Explorer.

From 2001 to 2006 Hugo worked at Microsoft Research (Cambridge, UK) with Stephen Robertson, where he explored applications of machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) for information retrieval (IR), in particular for corporate and web search, but also on document classification, expert finding, relevance feedback and dialogue generation for games. While at Microsoft Research Hugo also spent a considerable amount of time collaborating with Microsoft product groups such as MSN-Search and SharePoint Portal Server.

Before Cambridge Hugo taught Computer Science and completed a Ph.D. at the LIP6 (U. Paris 6), under the supervision Patrick Gallinari, on the application of dynamic probabilistic models to a wide range of Information Access problems.

[CREDITS: The Natural Retrieval group could not have been created without the support and encouragement of Ricardo Baeza-Yates, director of Yahoo! Research Barcelona. Over the years the group buzzed with the passion and talent of researchers like Massimiliano Ciaramita, Mihai Surdeanu, Peter Mika and Roi Blanco, and the guruness of engineers like Jordi Atserias or Michael Matthews. We also had the pleasure of hosting renegade Italian researchers (Attardi, Boldi and Vigna) in need of time away from Berlusconi.]

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