Probabilistic Topic Modeling In Web Search

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering


PhD Thesis Defence


Title: "Probabilistic Topic Modeling In Web Search"

By

Mr. Di JIANG


Abstract

In recent years, probabilistic topic modeling is gaining significant 
momentum in academia and industry. Many probabilistic topic models have 
been proposed by researchers and demonstrated good performance in 
real-word applications such as text mining and location based services. 
However, with the effectiveness of probabilistic topic modeling, applying 
it in web search scenarios has rarely been studied in existing work. In 
this thesis, we discuss how to adapt probabilistic topic modeling to three 
major functionalities of contemporary search engines: Web Search Query Log 
Analytics, Web Search Query Suggestion and Web Search Query Processing.

In Web Search Query Log Analytics, we first discuss the temporal topic 
models, which discover the dynamics of web search and profile each search 
engine user. Then we discuss the spatial topic models that capture the 
latent relations between search terms, URLs and geographical locations. In 
Web Search Query Suggestion, we present our approach of utilizing 
probabilistic topic modeling to capture search engine users' preferences, 
with the focus of integrating both diversification and personalization 
into the procedure of generating search query suggestion lists. In Web 
Search Query Processing, we first discuss two paradigms of incorporating 
probabilistic topic information into inverted index, then we present 
efficient query processing algorithms for top-k document retrieval with 
both TF-IDF and probabilistic topic information. We further demonstrate 
how to apply the proposed inverted indices and query processing algorithms 
to the scenario of mobile application search. Finally, we discuss possible 
future work of applying probabilistic topic modeling in web search 
scenarios.


Date:			Friay, 29 August 2014

Time:			10:30am - 12:30pm

Venue:			Room 3501
 			Lifts 25/26

Chairman:		Prof. Wenxiong Wang (LIFS)

Committee Members:	Prof. Wilfred Ng (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Frederick Lochovsky
 			Prof. Ke Yi
 			Prof. Weichuan Yu (ECE)
                        Prof. Qing Li (Comp. Sci., CityU)


**** ALL are Welcome ****