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Google Tech Talk: Reconsidering Relevance
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Reconsidering Relevance We've become complacent about relevance. The overwhelming success of web search engines has lulled even information retrieval (IR) researchers to expect only incremental improvements in relevance in the near future. And beyond web search, there are still broad search problems where relevance still feels hopelessly like the pre-Google web. But even some of the most basic IR questions about relevance are unresolved. We take for granted the very idea that a computer can determine which documents are relevant to a person's needs. And we still rely on two-word queries (on average) to communicate a user's information need. But this approach is a contrivance; in reality, we need to think of information-seeking as a problem of optimizing the communication between people and machines. We can do better. In fact, there are a variety of ongoing efforts to do so, often under the banners of "interactive information retrieval", "exploratory search", and "human computer information retrieval". In this talk, I'll discuss these initiatives and how they are helping to move "relevance" beyond today's outdated assumptions. About the Speaker Daniel Tunkelang is co-founder and Chief Scientist at Endeca, a leading provider of enterprise information access solutions. He leads Endeca's efforts to develop features and capabilities that emphasize user interaction. Daniel has spearheaded the annual Workshops on Human Computer Information Retrieval (HCIR) and is organizing the Industry Track for SIGIR '09. Daniel also publishes The Noisy Channel, a widely read and cited blog that focuses on how people interact with information. Daniel holds undergraduate degrees in mathematics and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a minor in psychology. He completed a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University for his work on information visualization. His work previous to Endeca includes stints at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center and AT&T Labs,
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Google Tech Talk: Reconsidering Relevance
- Reconsidering Relevance Daniel Tunkelang Chief Scientist, Endeca
- but first let’s set the stage
- iconic businesses of the 20 th and 21 st centuries I’m Feeling Lucky
- process and scale orchestration
- but there’s a dark side
- users are satisfied
- we need more definitions
- a relevance-centric approach information Need query select from results rank using IR model USER: SYSTEM: tf-idf PageRank
- queries are misinterpreted Results 1-10 out of about 344,000,000 for ir
- ranked lists are inefficient
- can we do better?
- human computer information retrieval
- google him!
- google scholar him?
- rexa him?
- getting better
- hcir-inspired interface
- tags provide summarization and guidance
- my information need evolves as i learn
- hcir – implementing the vision
- scatter/gather: a search for “star”
- faceted search
- showing the right facets: microwaves
- showing the right facets: ceiling fans
- results-driven clarification before refinement Search : storage
- crowd-sourcing to tag documents
- hcir cheats the precision / recall trade-off recall precision
- one more thing …
- “ Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
- organizer or referee?
Editor's Notes
- Friends, Countrymen, Googlers, I come to bury relevance, not to praise it. Well, that’s overstating the case. But I am here today to challenge your approach to information access, and more importantly to tease out and question its philosophical underpinnings. I realize that I’m singling you out as Googlers for holding a belief that is far more widely held, but you are the standard bearers of relevance. And you invited me. Notes: this presentation was delivered at the Google NYC office on 1/7/09. The title is an allusion to Tefko Saracevic’s article, “Relevance Reconsidered”. If you are interested in learning more about the history of relevance I highly recommend his 2007 Lazerow Memorial Lecture on “Relevance in information science” (http://mediabeast.ites.utk.edu/mediasite4/Viewer/?peid=fb8f84cb-9f82-499f-b12c-9a56ab5cf5ba).