Library & Information Science Seminar
School of Communication and Information
13 May 2009, Noon – 1:30pm, SCI Faculty Lounge (room 323, 4 Huntington Street, New Brunswick)
Modeling Information Seeking Behavior in Social Media
Eugene Agichtein, Emory University
Abstract: Social media is transforming how we seek and find information online: it is now a prominent part of the web information ecosystem, a powerful platform for information seeking, and a planet-scale experimental testbed for studying information seeking behavior and interactions. In particular, the Collaborative Question Answering (CQA) model has emerged as a potential alternative to automatic web search: participants post questions and answers, and rate and evaluate each other's contributions. The resulting archives of both the content and the context of the interactions complement the more limited web search interaction data, and provide a testbed for development of novel natural language processing, text mining, and information retrieval techniques. I will describe our progress on mining various traces of information seeking behavior in social media for improving search relevance, estimating content quality, and search intent and satisfaction with the obtained results.
Biosketch: Dr. Eugene Agichtein is an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at Emory University where he founded the Intelligent Information Access Laboratory. He is also affiliated with the Computational & Life Sciences program and the Linguistics program at Emory, and with the Web Science Initiative at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Eugene’s research interests are in information retrieval, user modeling, text and data mining, and their application to social computing and medical informatics. 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 research has been recognized with a Microsoft ‘Beyond Search’ award, and ICDE 2003 "best student paper" award, and a SIGMOD 2006 "best paper" award.
Further Information: For further information about Eugene’s visit, including the opportunity to meet with him while he’s here, please contact Nick Belkin, [email protected], 732 932 7500 x8271.