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European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) is a annual European scientific conference around bhe topics of search engines, recommender systems, text analytics, user modeling, and evaluation. This year ECIR was held in Grenoble, France. With more than 250 attendants and 4 days packed with tutorials, workshops, research, and industry talks, it was a great place to be to get updated with the latest and greatest about search engines.
The theme of this year’s Industry Day was to bring lessons learned from industry to academia. What are differences when developing a research algorithm and when we bring to practice? These lessons could inspire and inform our fellow academics for the challenges practitioners face when bring these algorithms to production.
In my talk I touched upon a bunch of challenges we’ve faced at 904Labs and how we came about to solving them. Open questions revolve around online learning to rank algorithms, delayed feedback, design of new metrics to avoid embarassing results, and the importance of investing in an evaluation platform. At 904Labs we have come a long way and we have working answers for these questions, however, as these questions are particularly difficult to answer, I’ve invited people to drop me a note with ideas, if they are interested. I’ve already got some nice feedback, and I hope to see more research on these areas in the near future!
Below are some tweets from my talk.
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This year I talked at the industry track where I shared my experiences from running a search startup in the Netherlands. I received positive feedback, and it was good to catch up with old friends and meet new people. If you want a short recap from the latest and greatest trends in search technology, read on my summary on 904Labs blog.
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The Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop was held this year in Delft. A nice lot of people from all around the Netherlands, Belgium, and a handful from abroad came together to share their research highlights from this year. It was a nice programme, filled with interesting short talks (about 15mins) that were great to give us a summary of what everybody is working on.
My personal highlight was Chato’s keynote speech on algorithmic bias. Although a lot is discussed on the topic, there is yet no to little work that presents some sort of foundation that describes the issue, frames it and offers some theoretical framework from which we can start thinking about solutions. Chato’s work laid the ground works on this area. He started with explaining what algorithmic bias is and stressed how coupled it is with data collection. I’m looking forward to seeing more on his work on the subject.
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In our talk, I described the importance of search in e-commerce by giving examples of failed searches in a number of settings, from finding advertized items using onsite search to mobile search. I followed by with why people choose Amazon to start their product search and highlighted that 54% of them choose Amazon because of their great search functionality–that is the reason number five for people to go to Amazon. Then, I explained why optimizing the ranking manually is close to impossible for humans by laying out the insane amount of options available and enumerating the search space (which can be at millions of millions of choices). With this as foundation, I talked about machine learning and the particular type of machine learning that we use at 904Labs for optimizing search rankings in real-time. I followed up with describing our query intent engine, which is powered by 904Sense, and our automatic synonym extraction engine. In my conclusions, I re-iterated that A.I. for Search
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| Information Retrieval Journal (IRJ) | Social News On the Web | IEEE’s Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering | European Conference on Informantion Retrieval (ECIR) 2013 | Journal of Internet Services and Applications | International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing | International Workshop and Challenge on News Recommender Systems | Information Retrieval Facility Conference (IRFC) | Information Processing & Management (IPM) | Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) | The Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR) | Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) | European Conference on Informantion Retrieval (ECIR) | Transactions on the Web (ToW) | Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 2012 | The Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop |European Conference on Informantion Retrieval (ECIR)
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Figure 1. At the stage of AI2Future.
AI2Future is a local, Croatian, initiative for disseminating the importance and for grounding the use of Artificial Intelligence. The conference brings together researchers, A.I. start ups, and large corporates from all around Croatia to share experiences and learn from each other on what A.I. can and cannot do.
I was invited to give one of the two keynote talks. The first keynote focused on conversational agents and natural language processing and mine followed up with insights how search powers a large spectrum of applications from search, question and answering, and recommendations. I focused on the work we do at 904Labs and illustrated the principles of online learning to rank through real-world examples from our experimences with our customers.
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I was invited to give a talk at the SIGIR Workshop On eCommerce 2019 but unfortunately, I am not attending SIGIR this year. Instead I wrote down some thoughts on interesting problems, ideas and challenges in the e-commerce domain. Here they are:
The vocabulary gap is still an open problem.
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It was an intense two days, with lots of people dropping by 904Labs’ booth and asking about what we do and how 904Labs search technology can help them in their settings. Altough the average visitor profile was not looking for onsite search, we had good chats with a bunch of Dutch and international and small, medium, and big companies on how onsite search can help their endeavors. We talked on how search technology is underneath many applications, including chatbots, and self-service applications. No matter the application, good search can help increase revenue in the setting of selling products, or reduce costs in the setting of self-service as visitors are better able to find the information they’re looking for without calling the company’s call centre.