Comments on: What You Can Find Out

By: Information Retrieval Gupf » Close the Loop!

Information Retrieval Gupf » Close the Loop! — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 22:09:30 +0000

[...] If that were enabled it would be a great example of exploratory search (see my earlier posts: What you can find out, Universal search is not exploratory search, and “Improving findability” falls short of [...]

By: jeremy

jeremy — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 02:24:50 +0000

@Dinesh: What I mean by it will be a paper submission to CIKM 2010. I’ll let you know if it gets in

By: Weekly Search & Social News: 01/19/2010 | Search Engine Journal

Weekly Search & Social News: 01/19/2010 | Search Engine Journal — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:15:09 +0000

[...] What You Can Find Out – Irgupf [...]

By: dinesh vadhia

dinesh vadhia — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:42:38 +0000

Your post is one of the most interesting (and clear) I’ve read in a while as the various threads are tied together. Both Mayer and you refer to the challenges of operating at vast scale (ie. “… capable of operating at vast scale.”, “Computational resources are going to be a challenge.”), and it maybe obvious what is meant but what do you mean by it?

By: jeremy

jeremy — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:34:30 +0000

But isn’t Jeopardy-search still known-item, fact lookup search?

I’m interested more in open-ended questions. Exploratory information needs, where the goal is to understand the relationship between different pieces of knowledge, just as much as it is finding those pieces of knowledge in the first place.

Right now, there seems to be a feeling that the only way we can understand the relationship between different pieces of knowledge is to be able to classify the data into some sort of taxonomy (or even folksonomy, I don’t care) and then use those semantics to form the basis of our comparisons and organization. That’s the parametric approach, where you classes form the functional structure around which you organize.

I would like to propose a research agenda in which we turn this around. Instead of relying on pre-existing structure, or on relying on our ability to do entity extraction to create that structure, why not let the user sort out the information he or she finds. As the user is doing the sorting, giving explicit feedback on what data is related and what is not related, the search engine can non-parametrically start to find information that follows the same similarity/dissimilarity user-defined structure.

Don’t pre-compute the structure. Let the user grow the structure organically, as the process evolves.

Maybe that is the way we’ve always done things. But it is not the way that online information seeking systems are set up. Time to bring ‘em back into traditional user behavior models?

By: Bob Carpenter

Bob Carpenter — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:16:36 +0000

I actually think things have always been this way, at least since libraries. It’s why I never liked closed book exams when I was a professor (or student) — it just wasn’t how you really went about solving a problem.

The social side of work is also important. I let students get any help they wanted on homework as long as they cited it. Because that’s how the real world works, at least in academia.

Just trolling the web isn’t enough. There’s a key social aspect to the kind of knowledge you pick up standing in line for coffee at a conference or in the lunch room at work. Blogs are adding a bit more of this to the web.

How about a game of Jeopardy where you can use the web? That’s how I’d play it if I had a class to teach how to search.