Friday, October 3, 2008

Rosie Jones - Thursday October 9th, 2008

3002 Newell-Simon Hall
Thursday, October 9, 2008
11:00am-12pm

Speaker : Rosie Jones

Title: Web Search Sessions


Abstract: Traditionally, information retrieval examines the search query in isolation: a query is used to retrieve documents, and the relevance of the documents returned are evaluated in relation to that query. However, users typically conduct web and other types of searches in sessions, issuing a query, examining results, and the re-issuing a modified query to improve the results. We decribe the properties of real web search sessions, and show that users conduct searches for both broad and finer grained tasks, which can be both interleaved and nested. We show that user search reformulations can be mined to identify related terms, and that we can identify the boundaries between tasks with greater accuracy than previous methods.

Bio:
Rosie Jones is a Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo!. Her research interests include web search, geographic information retrieval, and natural language processing. She received her PhD from the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Tom Mitchell, where her doctoral thesis was titled Learning to Extract Entities from Labeled and Unlabeled Text. She is co-organizing the WSDM 2009 Workshop on Web Search Click Data (WSCD09). She served on the Senior PC for SIGIR in 2007 and 2008, and is a Senior Member of the ACM.