Month: November 2008

Today, Yahoo announces a new tool to provide keywords describing search results that they make available to developers using their public BOSS API.

Meanwhile Google announces a new tool to tell you what keywords you should be paying Google to use in your AdWords campaign to advertise your site.

I imagine that the technology behind both tools isn’t all that different–or at least doesn’t have to be. But, while Yahoo makes friends in the technology community (especially among researchers), Google makes friends in the advertising community–and makes itself oodles of money. It’s all good to have friends, but someone has to pay the bills.

At the HCIR workshop last month, one of the posters was from Microsoft researchers Jaime Teevan, Susan Dumais, and Zachary Gutt, entitled “Challenges for Supporting Faceted Search in Large, Heterogeneous Corpora like the Web“.

From the abstract:

Those [challenges] that we have identified stem from the fact that such datasets are 1) very large, making it difficult to assign quality meta-data to every document and to retrieve the full set of results and associated metadata at query time, and 2) heterogeneous, making it difficult to apply the same metadata to every result or every query.

Drilling further into their position paper reveals three challenges:

• A lack of good, automatically generated metadata.
• Uncertainty as to which facets will be most valuable for particular information needs.
• The cost of dynamically computing facet distributions for result sets.

While these are all serious challenges, I feel that the position paper overstates them. Not all of the metadata needs to be generated automatically, and in any case there are lots of opporutnities to crowd-source metadata creation. Facet selection is more challenging, but the work we’ve done at Endeca on query clarification suggest that this problem is tractable. Finally, the computational challenge strikes me as an artifact of today’s ranked retrieval systems for web search, which are a bad fit for what is essentially a set retrieval problem.

I’m not saying that this problem isn’t hard. In fact, I think that the authors neglect the biggest challenge, which is the adversarial nature of web search. Arguably this problem is an implicit (but unstated) aspect of the metadata problem–there will be too much of an incentive to game it.

Nonetheless, I think the time is ripe to consider faceted search approaches for large, heterogeneous corpora like the web. And perhaps we can work around the adversarial model while we’re at it. But that’s the subject for another post.

Another nice post from Daniel Lemire today, this time about a paper by Mi Zhang and Neil Hurley on “Avoiding monotony: improving the diversity of recommendation lists” (ACM Digital Library subscription required to see full text).

Here’s an abstract of the abstract:

Noting that the retrieval of a set of items matching a user query is a common problem across many applications of information retrieval, we model the competing goals of maximizing the diversity of the retrieved list while maintaining adequate similarity to the user query as a binary optimization problem.

It’s nice to see a similarity vs. diversity trade-off for recommendations analogous to the precision vs. recall trade-off for typical information retreival evaluation.

Our experience at Endeca is certainly that most of the approaches out there underemphasize diversity, which not only leads to the “monotony” problem but also breaks down when the query does not unambiguously express the user’s intent. Since our approach emphasizes interaction, we leverage the diversity of the options we present to maximize the opportunity for users to make progress in satisfying their information needs.

I would like to second Daniel Lemire’s suggestion to perform user studies to investigate the optimal balance between diversity and accuracy. They’d make for great papers. Just remember to send him (and me!) copies!

Day 2 of the NSF Sponsored Symposium on Semantic Knowledge Discovery, Organization and Use at NYU brought out representatives of the titans of web search:

• Yahoo: Patrick Pantel (who actually just joined Yahoo) regaled us with entertaining tales “Of Search and Semantics”, whisking us through the history of search, arguing that semantics are making a commercial impact today, and then describing some current research at Yahoo. He elaborated a fair amount on SeeLEx, which stands for seed list expansion and is, in own own words, Yahoo’s version of Google Sets. But, unlike Google Sets, SeeLEx offers at least some transparency into the basis for similarity. I couldn’t fnd anything published other than the slides in my notebook from the symposium, but this is interesting work.
   
• Google: Marius Pasca delivered an excellent talk, though its title of “Web Search as an Online Word Game for Knowledge Discovery” was a bit misleading. Unfortunately, neither of the Google speakers provides slides for the symposium notebook–I hope that isn’t a mandate from Google’s corporate policy. In any case, the talk was along the lines of his AAAI 2008 paper, “Turning Web Text and Search Queries into Factual Knowledge: Hierarchical Class Attribute Extraction“. It presented an intriguing approach for inferring class atrributes based on a distributional analysis of query space–an approach that reminded me of his earlier CIKM paper on “Acquisition of categorized named entities for web search“. Unfortunately neither of these papers is available without the appropriate memberships, but perhaps Marius will send them to you if you ask nicely.
   
• Microsoft: Bill Dolan, Principal Researcher and manager of MSR’s Natural Language Processing Group, asked “Where does NLP stop and AI Begin?” He took us through the history of the MindNet project, and ruefully explained that it “worked beautifully” but “just not very often”. He made a compelling argument that semantic knowledge discovery researchers need to take a step back from AI-hard problems and focus on problems like paraphrase that are more amenable to the kind of progress we’ve seen in areas like machine translation.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you so. Declan McCullagh reports at CNET that privacy groups are expressing concern about Google Flu Trends:

The Electronic Privacy Information Center and Patient Privacy Rights sent a letter this week to Google CEO Eric Schmidt saying if the records are “disclosed and linked to a particular user, there could be adverse consequences for education, employment, insurance, and even travel.” It asks for more disclosure about how Google Flu Trends protects privacy.

I agree with Declan that

If you think that knowing that Alaska’s “influenza-like illness” number for the week of November 9 is 2.035 and California’s number is 1.384 is somehow worrisome and can identify you personally, it’s time to break out your tinfoil hat.

But, as the article gets to, the deeper concern is the one expressed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center:

There are no clear legal or technological privacy safeguards that prevent the disclosure of individual search histories. Without such privacy safeguards Google Flu Trends could be used to reidentify users who search for medical information. Such user-specific investigations could be compelled, even over Google’s objection, by court order or presidential authority.

I’m not paranoid, and I actually think that both privacy advocates and web search companies have often exaggerated privacy issues, especially since the AOL fiasco a couple of years ago. But EPIC is raising is a legitimate concern, and I think Google doesn’t seem to be providing very reassuring answers.

Specifically, web search companies are very protective of their log data in the name of privacy, much to the chagrin of researchers. And yet those same companies feel that privacy advocates exaggerate their concerns about the data being collected in the first place. Google / Yahoo / Microsoft: you can’t have it both ways!

A final point: Declan comments that “If users don’t like that, nobody’s forcing them to use Google.” I chalk that attitude up to his libertarianism rather than to any partiality he may have towards his wife’s employer. I have a libertartian streak myself, so I’m sympathetic. But, just as a practical matter, this is the sort of behavior that historically attracts regulation. Google and its rivals would do well to acknowledge the legitimacy of their critics’ concerns and regulate themselves first.