Abstract:
A key challenge in Web search is inferring the intent behind a search
query. But, the actual query words provide only a narrow glimpse into
the searcher intent. This talk will show how search could be made
substantially more effective by mining searchers interactions and
behavior data. For example, knowing which results or document regions
attract the searchers attention, can help automatically expand the query
to be more effective, or to indicate how well a result answers the
query. Previously, this kind of analysis was only possible in the
laboratory setting, severely limiting the scale and the impact of the
possible studies. To address this problem, we developed a variety of
techniques to acquire, analyze, and mine rich search behavior data. For
example, capturing and analyzing the patterns of cursor movement and
scrolling makes it possible to infer the searchers attention and
interests, enabling improvements to ranking, personalization, and
precise analysis of result quality and search effectiveness, at scale.
If time permits, I will also describe our current work on applications
of these techniques to cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
Biosketch:
Eugene Agichtein is an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics & Computer
Science department at Emory University, where he founded and leads the
Emory Intelligent Information Access Laboratory (IR Lab). The active
projects in IR Lab include mining searcher behavior and interactions
data for improving web search, modeling social content creation and
sharing, large-scale text mining and information extraction, and
applications to medical informatics. Eugene obtained a Ph.D. in Computer
Science from Columbia University, and did a Postdoc at Microsoft
Research. He has published extensively on web search, information
retrieval, and web and data mining, and has been honored with the Sloan
Research Fellowship, DARPA CSSG Fellowship, and Best Paper awards at the
SIGMOD 2006 and SIGIR 2011 conferences. Eugene's webpage is available
at: http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~eugene/
Refreshments served from 14:15 on,
Lecture starts at 14:30
