[IR Series] - Jaime Arguello - Thursday July 16th, 2009, 11:00 AM - Wean Hall 7220

[Jonathan Elsas]

Hello -- Please join us for our an IR series talk this Thursday.  NOTE  
the different time & location.

Speaker: Jaime Arguello (LTI, CMU)
Time & Date: Thursday July 16th, 2009, 11:00 AM
Place: Wean Hall 7220

Lunch will be provided by Yahoo!

Title: Sources of Evidence for Vertical Selection

Web search providers often include search services for domain-specific  
subcollections, called verticals, such as news, images, videos, job  
postings, company summaries, and artist profiles. We address the  
problem of vertical selection, predicting relevant verticals (if any)  
for queries issued to a search engine's main web search page. In  
contrast to prior collection selection tasks, vertical selection is  
associated with unique resources that can inform the  
classificationdecision. We focus on three sources of evidence: (1) the  
query string, from which features are derived independent of external  
resources, (2) logs of queries previously issued to the vertical  
directly by users, and (3) corpora representative of vertical content.  
These sources of evidence are integrated as features in a  
classification-based approach. We make use of and compare against  
prior work in federated search and retrieval effectiveness prediction.  
Our evaluation focuses on 18 different verticals, which differ in  
terms of semantics, media type, size, and level of query traffic. An  
in-depth error analysis reveals unique challenges across different  
verticals and provides insight into vertical selection for future work.

Based on work conducted at Yahoo! Labs Montreal to be presented at  
SIGIR 2009.


Thanks,

Jon, Jaime & Grace