Events — Colloquia & Seminars
Modeling User Interactions in Web Search and Social Media
Speaker: Eugene Agichtein, Emory University
Date: Monday, March 9, 2009
Talk: 10:00 AM, 366 WVH
Abstract
Social media is transforming online information access in at least three ways: as a prominent part of the web information ecosystem, as a platform for information seeking, and as a planet-scale experimental infrastructure for studying human behavior. In particular, Collaborative Question Answering (CQA) model has emerged as a potential alternative to web search: participants post questions and answers, and rate and evaluate each others contributions. The resulting archives of both the content and the context of the interactions provide a testbed for development of novel natural language processing, text mining, and information retrieval techniques. I will describe our new techniques for mining social media for tasks such as estimating content quality, contributor authority, and information seeker intent and satisfaction with the results. While the primary goal of this work is improving information access, I will also describe, if time permits, connections to medical informatics and public health research.
Brief Biography
Dr. Eugene Agichtein is an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at Emory University where he directs the Intelligent Information Access laboratory. Eugene’s research interests are in information retrieval, user modeling, text and data mining, and natural language processing. He received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2005, and a B.S. in Engineering from the Cooper Union in 1998. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Text Mining, Search, and Navigation group at Microsoft Research, and a consulting researcher at Yahoo! Research. Eugene's work was recognized with a Microsoft ”Beyond Search” award, Yahoo! faculty research award, and a SIGMOD 2006 best paper award.