6 research outputs found
Anticipating Information Needs Based on Check-in Activity
In this work we address the development of a smart personal assistant that is
capable of anticipating a user's information needs based on a novel type of
context: the person's activity inferred from her check-in records on a
location-based social network. Our main contribution is a method that
translates a check-in activity into an information need, which is in turn
addressed with an appropriate information card. This task is challenging
because of the large number of possible activities and related information
needs, which need to be addressed in a mobile dashboard that is limited in
size. Our approach considers each possible activity that might follow after the
last (and already finished) activity, and selects the top information cards
such that they maximize the likelihood of satisfying the user's information
needs for all possible future scenarios. The proposed models also incorporate
knowledge about the temporal dynamics of information needs. Using a combination
of historical check-in data and manual assessments collected via crowdsourcing,
we show experimentally the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: Proceedings of the 10th ACM International Conference on Web Search
and Data Mining (WSDM '17), 201
Target Apps Selection: Towards a Unified Search Framework for Mobile Devices
With the recent growth of conversational systems and intelligent assistants
such as Apple Siri and Google Assistant, mobile devices are becoming even more
pervasive in our lives. As a consequence, users are getting engaged with the
mobile apps and frequently search for an information need in their apps.
However, users cannot search within their apps through their intelligent
assistants. This requires a unified mobile search framework that identifies the
target app(s) for the user's query, submits the query to the app(s), and
presents the results to the user. In this paper, we take the first step forward
towards developing unified mobile search. In more detail, we introduce and
study the task of target apps selection, which has various potential real-world
applications. To this aim, we analyze attributes of search queries as well as
user behaviors, while searching with different mobile apps. The analyses are
done based on thousands of queries that we collected through crowdsourcing. We
finally study the performance of state-of-the-art retrieval models for this
task and propose two simple yet effective neural models that significantly
outperform the baselines. Our neural approaches are based on learning
high-dimensional representations for mobile apps. Our analyses and experiments
suggest specific future directions in this research area.Comment: To appear at SIGIR 201
Reply With: Proactive Recommendation of Email Attachments
Email responses often contain items-such as a file or a hyperlink to an
external document-that are attached to or included inline in the body of the
message. Analysis of an enterprise email corpus reveals that 35% of the time
when users include these items as part of their response, the attachable item
is already present in their inbox or sent folder. A modern email client can
proactively retrieve relevant attachable items from the user's past emails
based on the context of the current conversation, and recommend them for
inclusion, to reduce the time and effort involved in composing the response. In
this paper, we propose a weakly supervised learning framework for recommending
attachable items to the user. As email search systems are commonly available,
we constrain the recommendation task to formulating effective search queries
from the context of the conversations. The query is submitted to an existing IR
system to retrieve relevant items for attachment. We also present a novel
strategy for generating labels from an email corpus---without the need for
manual annotations---that can be used to train and evaluate the query
formulation model. In addition, we describe a deep convolutional neural network
that demonstrates satisfactory performance on this query formulation task when
evaluated on the publicly available Avocado dataset and a proprietary dataset
of internal emails obtained through an employee participation program.Comment: CIKM2017. Proceedings of the 26th ACM International Conference on
Information and Knowledge Management. 201
Entity-Oriented Search
This open access book covers all facets of entity-oriented search—where “search” can be interpreted in the broadest sense of information access—from a unified point of view, and provides a coherent and comprehensive overview of the state of the art. It represents the first synthesis of research in this broad and rapidly developing area. Selected topics are discussed in-depth, the goal being to establish fundamental techniques and methods as a basis for future research and development. Additional topics are treated at a survey level only, containing numerous pointers to the relevant literature. A roadmap for future research, based on open issues and challenges identified along the way, rounds out the book. The book is divided into three main parts, sandwiched between introductory and concluding chapters. The first two chapters introduce readers to the basic concepts, provide an overview of entity-oriented search tasks, and present the various types and sources of data that will be used throughout the book. Part I deals with the core task of entity ranking: given a textual query, possibly enriched with additional elements or structural hints, return a ranked list of entities. This core task is examined in a number of different variants, using both structured and unstructured data collections, and numerous query formulations. In turn, Part II is devoted to the role of entities in bridging unstructured and structured data. Part III explores how entities can enable search engines to understand the concepts, meaning, and intent behind the query that the user enters into the search box, and how they can provide rich and focused responses (as opposed to merely a list of documents)—a process known as semantic search. The final chapter concludes the book by discussing the limitations of current approaches, and suggesting directions for future research. Researchers and graduate students are the primary target audience of this book. A general background in information retrieval is sufficient to follow the material, including an understanding of basic probability and statistics concepts as well as a basic knowledge of machine learning concepts and supervised learning algorithms