A recent article appearing in the Washington Post about the advancement of search engine technology featured Syracuse University School of Information Studies (iSchool) Dean Elizabeth Liddy.
Liddy commented that search engine technology is advancing to the point where they will begin to understand how subjects, verbs and objects interact within a sentence, including distinguishing between active a passive voice, and filtering pages about Washington, D.C. from a search about the state of Washington.
Elizabeth D. Liddy is dean and Trustee Professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. In 1999, she was appointed director of the schools Center for Natural Language Processing, which advances the development of human-like language understanding software capabilities for government, commercial and consumer applications. She teaches graduate courses in information retrieval, natural language processing, and data mining. Liddy holds a bachelors degree in English language and literature from Daemen College (1966) and an M.L.S. in information studies (1977) and a Ph.D. in information transfer (1988), both from SU.