CASIA

Advanced Lecture Series in Pattern Recognition

TITLE：Understanding search users: What have been achieved and what haven’t?

SPEAKER：Prof. Jian-Yun Nie (University of Montreal)

CHAIR：Prof. Chengqing Zong

TIME：July 22(Tuesday), 2014, 10:00AM

VENUE：No.1 Conference Room (3rd floor), Intelligence Building

ABSTRACT：

In information retrieval (IR) and search engines, the quality of an answer strongly depends on how well the user’s query is correctly understood. In this talk, I will distinguish several levels of query understanding, from basic term weighting to search intent understanding and question answering. I will describe the general approaches and the progress made in this direction. Although the current search engines often exhibit some level of intelligence in understanding user’s queries and search intents, we are still far from the ultimate goal of true understanding. I will discuss about the key issues to be addressed for this ultimate goal.

BIOGRAPHY：

Jian-Yun Nie is a professor in University of Montreal. He has been working in the areas of information retrieval and natural language processing for about 25 years. His research topics include information retrieval models, cross-language information retrieval, query expansion and understanding, etc. Jian-Yun Nie has published a number of papers on these topics and his papers have been widely cited. He is on editorial boards of 7 international journals, and is a regular PC member of the major conferences in these areas. In particular, he has been the general chair of SIGIR conference in 2011 held in Beijing.

HOLDER: Pattern Recognition Lab