About Me
I love both languages and computers. So naturally, my main interest is Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. I have obsession with data and I'm curious about how things work, so I am very interested in all kind of machine learning algorithms, search and search engines. It is fascinating what we can do with this today :)
I currently work in Aol Answers, (formerly Yedda), as part of the R&D team, Where I play with Solr, clusters, and some other amazing machine learning things that makes our work a lot more interesting. We work on innovative algorithmic solutions for large-scale, real-world issues, mainly on problems related to classification, matching, relevancy and performance.
I used to be a staff member at the IBM research Lab in Haifa, where I worked in the Search Technologies department, developing Juru (Java full text search engine) and the WebSphere Portal search engine.
I hold MSc from the Computer Science department at The University of Haifa, in the field of Natural Language Processing.
You can reach me at:
Email: danny@shach.am
Cell: 972-52-4457130
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Personal Links
What we live for
In my spare time I love biking, mainly XC, using my GT bikes (and started to record my trips here).
I also like to hike, and I used to guide at Sayarut Groups. One of my greatest loves is our Negev, yellow, open and quiet. I also try to travel as much as I can outside of Israel as well. Some Photos from my many tracks can be seen here.
I use to go trekking with Radius trips mainly to Jordan. Some pictures can be found here and here.
I'm not much of an athlete but I like to see sport, especially football - Maccaby Haifa and Real Madrid.
But my main time consumer is my magnificent family:
   
We live in Kfar Kish (a small village near Afula, see how we built our home).
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Research
My primary research interests lie at the boundary between human languages and computer science, sometimes referred to as natural language processing.
My thesis is in the field of Natural Language Processing. It was done under the supervision of Dr.Shuly Wintner
Because of the complex morphology of Semitic languages, even shallow applications, such as search and information retrieval engines, require morphological analysis and disambiguation as a first step. The unique word formation machinery, along with the standard Hebrew orthography, which leaves most of the vowels unspecified, make morphological disambiguation of Hebrew a much more complex endeavor than the parallel POS tagging task for English.
Our approach in this research was to try to decouple the problem into simpler classification tasks and then combine the results in a sophisticated manner, taking into account the constraints that hold among the various components.
We presented the HAifa morphological DisAmbiguation System (HADAS). This system uses the output of a morphological analyzer and a limited linguistic knowledge, for disambiguating Hebrew morphologically annotated text. HADAS consists of several (currently, 10) simple classifiers and a module which combines them.
Projects and Groups
- Computational Linguistics Group, research in diverse areas of computational linguistics and natural language processing.
- Juru: A full-text search library.
- QSIA: A collaborative e-learning and knowledge sharing infrastructure.
Publications
Conference Papers
Danny Shacham and Shuly Wintner. Morphological Disambiguation of Hebrew: A Case Study in Classifier Combination. In Proceedings of the 2007 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CoNLL), pages 439-447, Prague, June 2007. [PDF Download]
Idan Szpektor, Ido Dagan, Alon Lavie, Danny Shacham and Shuly Wintner. Cross Lingual and Semantic Retrieval for Cultural Heritage Appreciation. In Proceedings of the ACL-2007 Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage Data (LaTeCH 2007), pages 65-72, Prague, June 2007. [PDF Download]
Demo: Hebrew Morphological Disambiguation, IBM Haifa Research Labs, Information Retrieval Seminar, December 2005. [PDF]
Talk: Morphological Disambiguation of Hebrew Using a Combination of Simple Classifiers, ISCOL, Israeli Seminar on Computational Linguistics, June 2005. [abstract, PDF]
Thesis
Danny Shacham. Morphological Disambiguation of Hebrew. University of Haifa MSc. Thesis, 2007 [PDF Download]
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