Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher: a crowdsourcing and social network approach to search

Politecnico Di Milano Dipartimento Di Elettronica e Informazione Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher A crowdsourcing approach to searchAlessandro Bozzon, Marco Brambilla, Stefano CeriWWW 2012, Lyon, FranceApril, 20th 2012

Context• Web is a huge, heterogeneous data source: • Structured, unstructured and semi-structured data • Known problems of trust, reputation, consistency• User needs to solve real-life problems, not to find a web site Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Context Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Context• User needs to solve real-life problems, not to find a web site • Web queries get increasingly complex and specialized • Exploratory search • From document search to object search• Search as a service • Viability of systems based upon search service orchestration Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Background: semantic multi-domain search“… search for upcoming concerts close to an attractive location (like a beach, lake, mountain, natural park, and so on), considering also availability of good, close-by hotels …” Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Background: semantic multi-domain search “… expand the search to get information about available restaurants near the candidate concert locations, news associated to the event and possible options to combine further events …” Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Liquid Query:Query Submission [WWW2010] Example Scenario 1: Trip planner for events Concert Hotels query conditions query conditions Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Liquid Query:Query Execution Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Liquid Query: alternative visualizationsand domain-independent platformExample Scenario 2: Scientific Publication search Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Problem Statement• When dealing with real-life problems, people do not trust the web completely • Want to go back to discussion with people • Expect insights, opinions, reassurance Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Problem Statement• When dealing with real-life problems, people do not trust the web completely • Want to go back to discussion with people • Expect insights, opinions, reassurance• Our proposal Interleaving and integration of exploratory search and social community input Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Social Search: increasing quality in search• From exploratory search to friends and experts feedback Initial query Exploration Exploratory step Human Search Search System System Exploration step System API Social API Database / Crowd / IR index Community Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

From crowds to communities –The problems• Crowds vs. social networks • Friends or workforce?• Complex interleaving of factors. Including: • Intensity of social activity of the asker • Motivation of the responders • Topic • Information diffusion • Timing of the post (hour of the day, day of the week) • Context and language barrier Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Task management problemsTypical crowdsourcing problems:• Task splitting: the input data collection is too complex relative to the cognitive capabilities of users.• Task structuring: the query is too complex or too critical to be executed in one shot.• Task routing: a query can be distributed according to the values of some attribute of the collection.Plus:• Platform/community assignment: a task can be assigned to different communities or social platforms based on its focus Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Social Search – query properties• Invited community• Engagement platform• Execution platform• Query type: Like, Add, Sort / Rank, Comment, Modify• Visibility: public or private• Diffusion: enabled or not• Timespan Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Deployment: search on the social network• Multi-platform deployment Generated query template Embedded External Native Standalone application application application API Social/ Crowd platform Native Embedding behaviours Community / Crowd Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Deployment: search on the social network• Multi-platform deployment Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Example: Find your next job (exploration) Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Example: Find your job (social invitation) Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Example: Find your job (social invitation) Selected data items can be transferredto the crowd question Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Find your job (response submission) Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Experimental setting• Some 150 users• Two classes of experiments: • Random questions on fixed topics: interests (e.g. restaurants in the vicinity of Politecnico), to famous 2011 songs, or to top-quality EU soccer teams • Questions independently submitted by the users• Different invitation strategies: • Random invitation • Explicit selection of responders by the asker• Outcome • 175 like and insert queries • 1536 invitations to friends • 95 questions (~55%) got at least one answer • 230 collected answers Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Experiments: Manual and random questions Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Experiments: Interest and relationship• Manually written and assigned questions are consistently more responded in time Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Experiments: Query type• Engagement depends on the difficulty of the task• Like vs. Add tasks: Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Experiments: Distribution of answers/invitation• Sometimes: more answers than invitations (limited cases) Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Experiment: Social platform• The question enactment platform role• Facebook vs. Doodle Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Experiment: Posting time• The question enactment platform role• Facebook vs. Doodle Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

Conclusions and future workStatus• the chances to get responses depend a lot on the consistency of the users’ community and on the mechanisms that are exploited for inviting the users and for collecting the responsesFuture work• More experiments (e.g., vs. sociality of users, vs. crowds, …)• Not only search: active integration of web structured data and social sensorsSome ads• Search Computing book series (Springer LNCS)• Workshop Very Large Data Search at VLDB• VLDB Journal special issue (deadline Sept 2012) Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher

www.search-computing.org @searchcomputingThanks!Questions? @marcobrambi marco.brambilla@polimi.it

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Answering Search Queries with CrowdSearcher: a crowdsourcing and social network approach to search

by Marco Brambilla

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