Implicit Feedback: Techniques for Deployment and Evaluation

  • Ryen White | University of Maryland

Searchers can find the construction of query statements for submission to search systems a problematic activity. Implicit feedback models can proactively support searchers by passively observing interaction behavior and making recommendations about new query words to add, or retrieval strategies to adopt. Implicit feedback is typically gathered through monitoring behaviors such as bookmarking, saving or printing. Using document retention in this way can be worthwhile, but it is seldom observed in studies of Web search behavior and is highly context dependent. In this talk I will describe my approach to implicit feedback. I will give an overview of content-rich interfaces I have developed to improve the quality (and quantity) of searcher interaction, heuristic and probabilistic implicit feedback frameworks that use their interaction, and decision measures that approximate changes in searcher interests. I will describe how I evaluate my techniques with human subjects and simulations of searcher behavior. As an addendum, I will describe how this research fits into my other current work on exploratory search, story building for relevance feedback, query expansion, and positive and negative implicit feedback using eye tracking.

Speaker Details

Dr. Ryen White has been a Faculty Research Associate in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland since November 2004, where he is doing research in information retrieval and human-computer interaction. Prior to this he was a Ph.D. candidate in the Information Retrieval Group in the Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, U.K. In October 2004 he completed his doctoral studies on the development and testing of new ways to search collections such as the World Wide Web. He has published over 30 journal and conference articles on various aspects of information retrieval. In 2003 he received the Brian Shackel Best Paper Award at the INTERACT 2003 conference and Best Student Paper at the 2004 European Conference on Information Retrieval. In 2005 he received the British Computer Society/Conference of Professors and Heads of Computing Distinguished Dissertation Award for the Best Computer Science Ph.D. in the United Kingdom for 2004/2005. Along with a collaborator from Microsoft Research, and two others, he is currently a guest editor for a Special Section of the Communications of the ACM entitled “Supporting Exploratory Search”, due for publication in April 2006.

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