Howard R. Turtle

Director

e-mail address: turtle@syr.edu

Dr. Howard R. Turtle is Director of the Center for Natural Language Processing in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.  His research interests include the design & implementation of retrieval systems, techniques for representing and understanding text, automatic classification, text mining, and automated inference techniques.

Dr. Turtle developed a formal retrieval model based on Bayesian Inference Networks that formed the basis of the highly regarded University of Massachusetts' Inquery IR System and of West Publishing's natural language search product.  He was actively involved in the development of Indri, an open source search engine based on Language Models and inference network operators.

Before joining Syracuse, Turtle spent ten years in technical consulting. Projects included information retrieval system design & evaluation, text classification & mining, technology assessment, and intellectual property protection.  His applied research projects focused on faceted retrieval, geographic retrieval, range retrieval for typed data, and improved update / access concurrency.

Prior to his consulting work, Dr. Turtle served as Chief Scientist & Principal Research Scientist at West Publishing, the leading provider of legal information access technology. At West, he conducted and directed research on new information retrieval capabilities, text management, and text classification technologies, including West's natural language retrieval system and the Key Cite citator service for legal researchers.

Prior to his position at West, he was Chief Scientist at OCLC Online Computer Library Center, where he held corporate-wide responsibility for technology assessment, managed and conducted internal technical audits, represented OCLC on external technical standards groups such as X3T5.5 and NISO D, and conducted research to analyze user behavior with interactive systems.

Prior to his time at OCLC, he was a Research Scientist at Battelle Labs, where he designed & implemented software for the BASIS information retrieval system and participated in telecommunications consulting projects for corporate clients.

Turtle earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has published in ACM-TOIS, AI & Law Journal, IP&M, Computer Journal, ACM-SIGIR, IJCAI, RIAO, ASIST, and TREC.