Subject: CALD Seminar - November 21, 2005
Speaker:  Elad Yom-Tov
Wean Hall 5409
Noon until 1:00

Title: Learning to Estimate Query Difficulty

Abstract: In my talk I will present novel learning methods for estimating
the quality of results returned by a search engine in response to a query.
Estimation is based on the agreement between the top results of the full
query and the top results of its sub-queries. I will demonstrate the
usefulness of quality estimation for several applications, among them
improvement of retrieval, detecting queries for which no relevant  content
exists in the document collection, and distributed information retrieval.
Experiments on TREC data demonstrate the robustness and the effectiveness
of our learning algorithms.
This talk is based on our work which won the SIGIR 2005 Best Paper award.