Ido Dagan holds B.Sc. (Summa Cum Laude) and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Technion, Israel. He conducted his Ph.D. research in collaboration with the IBM Haifa Scientific Center, where he was a research fellow in 1991. During 1992-1994 he was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories. During 1994-1998 he has been at the Department of Computer Science of Bar Ilan University, to which he returned in 2003. During 1998-2003 he was co-founder and CTO of a text categorization startup company, FocusEngine, and VP of Technology at LingoMotors, a Cambridge Massachusetts company which acquired FocusEngine.

His research interests for over a decade have been within empirical and learning methods for language processing, often operating over rich linguistic representations, with particular emphasis on unsupervised semantic learning. In the last few years he has introduced textual entailment as a generic framework for applied semantic inference over texts. With our colleagues, we organized the three rounds of the PASCAL Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) Challenges (2004-2007), which attracted dozens of research groups and became the primary forum for empirical evaluation of semantic inference systems. At the Bar Ilan NLP group he develops computational models of textual entailment, including automatic knowledge acquisition, semantic inference, and information extraction and retrieval applications.

Research Topics:

• Natural language processing
• Machine learning and statistical methods
• Information retrieval and text analysis