[IR discussion Series] Rosie Jones,Thursday 9th Oct 11am

[Grace Hui Yang]

Dear all,
   We are pleased to have Rosie Jones from Yahoo! research to give her 
talk on Web Search Sessions next Thursday. Please mark your calender for 
her talk. Lunch will be provided by Yahoo!.
    See you then!

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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.