Olga Vechtomova

Biography

Olga Vechtomova is a Management Sciences Associate Professor, and is cross-appointed to the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. She is also the Director of the Master of Management Science (MMSC) Online Program and the Associate Dean for Engineering Computing. Her expertise lies in the areas of information retrieval, natural language processing and computational linguistics. Dr. Vechtomova’s current research interests include entity retrieval, identification of semantic relations between entities in text, opinion retrieval and the use of semantic graphs in interactive information retrieval. To delve into further detail, entity retrieval and identification of semantic relations between entities in text involves extracting entities (such as people, organizations, or products) in response to a user’s query, and identifying the type of semantic relation between the retrieved entity and the entities in the query. Targeted opinion retrieval includes automatic identification of positive and negative opinions expressed about an entity, for example opinions expressed by people about various aspects of products or businesses in online reviews. As a result of her research work, Dr. Vechtomova has written over 40 papers in journals and conference proceedings.

Research Interest

Information Retrieval Information Extraction Natural Language Processing