Yahoo! Research Talk
Fernando Diaz (UMass Amherst CS Ph.D. '08),
Research Scientist,
Yahoo! Montreal
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
9:15 a.m. in CS 151
"Integration of News Content Into Web Results"
Aggregated search refers to the integration of content from specialized corpora or verticals into web search results. Aggregation improves search when the user has vertical intent but may not be aware of or desire vertical search. In this talk, I will give an overview of vertical selection and present the example of integrating search results from a news vertical into web search results. News is particularly challenging because, given a query, the appropriate decision---to integrate news content or not---changes with time. I will present a system which adapts to news intent in two ways. First, by inspecting the dynamics of the news collection and query volume, the system can track development of and interest in topics. Second, by using click feedback, the system can quickly recover from system errors. I will define several click-based metrics which allow a system to be monitored and tuned without annotator effort.
Refreshments, provided by Yahoo!, will be served at 9:00 a.m.