June 25, Wednesday
12:00 – 13:30
Toward Task Completion Assistance in Web Information Retrieval
Students seminar
Lecturer : Ronny Lempel
Affiliation : Yahoo! Research, Haifa
Location : 202/37
Host : Students seminar
This talk will describe some of the challenges currently addressed by Web Information Retrieval systems, namely search engines. The first generation of search engines closely resembled classic IR systems in their goal to return relevant documents to a user's query. Those systems relied mostly on on-page contents. The second generation of search engines added the links between Web pages to the mix, and differentiated between several types of information needs. Today's engines tap huge amounts of user generated content, and focus on helping users to complete tasks. This involves both assisting users to break down their tasks into sub-tasks, as well as interpretation, aggregation and integration of diverse content that allows users to more readily digest complex information. The talk will explore some of the search assistance tools available today and will highlight some of the technical challenges in their development.