[Asis-l] HCIL talk: Automatic Evaluation of WWW Search Services - Nov 24

[Bill Kules]

Monday, November 24, 2:00 pm
AV Williams, Room 2120

Dr. Abdur Chowdhury
Automatic Evaluation of World Wide Web Search Services

Abstract: The web is a highly dynamic and growing environment of information
resources. Search engines are constantly trying to keep up with changes in
data and user information needs while still maintaining effective results.
While many metrics may be used to evaluate these services, like size,
refresh rate, or data types, users are mostly concerned with effectiveness
in terms of result quality. Trying to understand how successful these
engines are is costly in terms of manual effort. Thus, finding ways of
automatically evaluating search engines benefits both companies and users.
Additionally, it poses a number of research questions on how that task can
be accomplished in a statistically significant manner. We explore a
technique of statistical sampling of queries along with human built web
directories to try and estimate what the best engines are. We show that
these techniques can be run often and are strongly correlated to manual
evaluation efforts.
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Abdur Chowdhury is an Architect for the Search and Navigation group at
America Online and oversees research and development efforts for the group.
Prior to coming to AOL, he worked with NIH/IITRI designing information
systems and at the University of Maryland as the manager for the Systems
Engineering and Integration Lab. Dr. Chowdhury received his Ph.D. from IIT
(Illinois Institute of Technology) in 2001.

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Bill Kules
Principal, Takoma Software, Inc., Takoma Park, MD
  www.takoma-software.com
Research Assistant, University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab
  www.cs.umd.edu/hcil

wmk at takoma-software.com
(301) 891-7271 voice
(301) 891-7273 fax
(240) 460-7376 mobile
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