Raymond J. Mooney

Professor of Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin.

B.S. in Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, 1983
M.S. in Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, 1985
Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, 1988

Research Interests

As a member of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory I lead the Machine Learning Research Group where our recent research focuses on (click on an area for related publications):

Natural Language Learning: Learning for syntactic and semantic parsing, lexicon acquisition, information extraction, machine translation, and word sense disambiguation.
Learning for Recommender Systems and Text Categorization: Content-based recommending and automated web-page classification.
Text Mining: Discovering knowledge from text using information extraction and rule induction.
Inductive Logic Programming: Learning Prolog programs from examples.
Knowledge-Base and Theory Refinement: Automatically modifying rule bases and Bayesian networks to fit empirical data.
Learning for Planning: Learning search-control heuristics to improve planning efficiency and quality.

For more information and publications, see the home page for the UT Machine Learning Research Group .

Also see information on the UT Data Mining Group and our Data Mining Seminar Series.

I am also affiliated with the UT Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.

I serve on the technical advisory board and have worked part time for Whizbang! Labs, an Internet company specializing in using machine learning to develop systems for extracting and integrating information on the web (such as the FlipDog job search site).

See neat demos of learning natural-language database interfaces called Geoquery, RestaurantQuery, and JobFinder!

See a demo of a learning content-based book-recommending system Libra!

See information on the Special issue of the AI Magazine on Empirical Natural Language Processing which I co-edited.

See information on the Special issue of the Machine Learning journal on Natural Language Learning which I co-edited.

See the slides from a tutorial on Symbolic Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing I cotaught at ACL-99.

See my complete vita (in postscript) and a somewhat dated research summary statement.

Course Information

Fall 2001

CS 378: Intelligent Information Retrieval and Web Search (NEW COURSE!)

Fall 2000

Spring 2000

CS 351: LISP and Symbolic Computation

Personal History

I grew up in the 60's and 70's in the small town of O'Fallon Illinois where starting in 1967 I attended St. Clare grade school and, starting in 1975, O'Fallon Township Highschool. In the fall of 1979, I went to the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana to obtain all of the degrees listed above. In December 1987, I completed my Ph.D. thesis in the Explanation-Based Learning Group under the direction of Prof. Gerald DeJong and then began as a faculty member here in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin where I have recently completed the first decade of a hopefully long academic career.

See more information on my academic genealogy.

Personal Pictures

My dog Sheila.

Contact Information

Office:: 4.130B Taylor Hall, (512) 471-9558
Email address:: mooney@cs.utexas.edu (Finger)
Fax:: (512) 471-8885
Postal address:: Department of Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1188
U.S.A.
Home address:: 4707 Eby Lane
Austin, Texas 78731-4507
U.S.A.

mooney@cs.utexas.edu