Beauty is in the "I"
of the Beholder
Intelligence, Information, Interaction

Speaker:

Susan T. Dumais

Title:

Bring Order to the Web and Beyond

(9:30 a.m.-10:30 a.m., March 10, 2000, Lindley Hall 102)

Abstract:

This talk describes algorithmic and interface innovations to help users organize web search results. Today web search services returned a ranked list of best-matching pages and users have to sift through them sequentially. An important mechanism for facilitating information access in a wide variety of applications is a structure knowledge hierarchy, such as those used by library classification systems and more recently web directories like Yahoo! and LookSmart. In this talk I will describe how such structure can be used to automatically organize web search results. For example, a query about "saturn" will group the returned pages into those having to do with automobiles, computer games, and outer space. There are two key technologies for doing this: 1) developing models for hierarchically classifying arbitrary text pages on-the-fly, and 2) building an interface for taking advantage of the resulting structure. I will begin by talking about enhancements to support vector machine (SVM) learning algorithms for text classification that exploit hierarchical structure. I will then describe a user interface that supports structured search and a user study that shows that people are 50% faster at finding information when it is organized into categories.