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Manuel Zahariev wants computers to understand what people say and write.

"The easy problems in computer science have been solved already," says the Garibaldi Highlands resident. "Natural language processing is the frontier."

Zahariev knows a few things about both language and computers. Not only is he fluent in English, French, Romanian and Bulgarian with a knowledge of Serbian and Hungarian, he recently completed a PhD in computing science from SFU, where he will receive the dean of graduate studies medal as the top student in applied science.

He explains that although internet search engines can recognize keywords or phrases, they understand almost nothing of the text they are searching from.

He has designed software to address one specific type of information extraction: identifying what a particular acronym means from text that discusses it.

So many new acronyms are being created (think SARS, for example) that dictionaries can not keep up. Now that this program is 92 to 95 per cent accurate, he plans to move on to matching the names of products and people to information on the web. Finding information about people is especially difficult.

Through his software company, Amware Enterprises, Zahariev would like to commercialize the results of his thesis, building more knowledgeable search engines. He is also considering an academic career.


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