Relevance Ranking for Search Engines

Speaker:        Prof. Yi Chang
                Dean, School of Artificial Intelligence
                Jilin University

Title:          "Relevance Ranking for Search Engines"

Date:           Monday, 28 January 2019

Time:           2:00pm - 3:00pm

Venue:          Room 2406 (via lift 17/18), HKUST

Abstract:

Relevance ranking of search engine is a billion-dollar challenge, while
there is a disadvantage of backwardness in web search competition.
Learning to rank algorithms could effectively improve relevance ranking,
yet it is a systematic effort to continuously improve the relevance of a
search engine. In this talk, I will introduce the background and the most
recent advances in this topic, in particular, three key techniques:
ranking functions, semantic matching features and query rewriting. The
major part of this talk is based on our ACM KDD'2016 Best Paper Award.



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Biography:

Prof. Yi Chang is the Dean of the newly built School of Artificial
Intelligence, Jilin University, and he is actively looking for
tenure-track faculty candidates at different levels. He was a Technical
Vice President at Huawei Research America from 2016 to 2018, where he was
in charge of knowledge graph, question answering and vertical search
technologies within Huawei. Before that, he was a research director at
Yahoo Research from 2006 to 2016, and in charge of relevance of Yahoo's
web search engine and vertical search engines. He has broad research
interests on information retrieval, data mining and artificial
intelligence. He has published more than 100 research papers in premium
conferences or journals, and received the Best Paper Award on ACM
WSDM'2016, the Best Paper Award on ACM KDD'2016 separately. He has
actively involved in multiple academia services: he successfully chaired
ACM WSDM'2018, and he will chair SIGIR'2020 in Xi'An, China. He was
elected as an ACM Distinguished Scientist, due to his contributions to
intelligent algorithms for search engines.