Web Search: From Information Retrieval Engines to Task Completion environments

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The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Human Language Technology Center
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Speaker:	Andrei BRODER
		Fellow and Vice President, Yahoo! Research
		Chief Scientist, Search and Advertising Product Groups

Title:		"Web Search: From Information Retrieval Engines to Task
		 Completion environments"

Date:		Monday, 2 November 2009

Time:		4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theatre F (Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theatre,
				   near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

The classic IR model assumes a human engaged in activity that generates an
"information need".  This need is verbalized and then expressed as
a query to a search engine over a defined corpus.  Since inception, Web
search engines have evolved from a first generation based on classic IR
algorithms scaled to web size and thus supporting only informational
queries, to a second generation supporting navigational queries using web
specific information (primarily link analysis), to a third generation
enabling transactional and other "semantic" queries based on a variety of
technologies aimed to directly satisfy the unexpressed "user intent", thus
moving further and further away from the classic model.

What is coming next?  In this talk, we argue that Web search engines are
becoming "task completion environments" that (a) provide
increasingly sophisticated tools to infer the user intent going from simple
query completion all the way to "information supply engines" driven
by context rather than by explicit queries  and (b) provide tools and
facilities to enable the mining of web search results or, even better,
 direct answers built from the integration of deep web mining with user
data.  Thus, the technology "hot spot" is moving from the web
search results per-se, to web knowledge mining, user understanding, and
query pre- and post-processing.



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Biography:

Andrei Broder is a Fellow and Vice President for Computational Advertising
in Yahoo! Research. He also serves as Chief Scientist for the Search and
Advertising product groups. Previously he was an IBM Distinguished Engineer
and the CTO of the Institute for Search and Text Analysis in IBM Research.
From 1999 until 2002 he was Vice President for Research and Chief Scientist
at the AltaVista Company. He graduated Summa cum Laude from the Technion,
and obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University