SIMS%20296a-3:%20Current%20Topics%20in%20Information%20Access

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SIMS 296a-3Current Topics in Information Access

• Marti Hearst
• Fall 98

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Today

• Introductions
• Goals and Course Requirements
• Administrivia
• Topics
• What is Information Access
• Current Topics (an outline)
• Intro to IA

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Goals

• Become expert on the state-of-the-art in timely
  topics related to information access
• Begin getting research results.

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Course Requirements

• To get S/U credit for the class
• Lead two discussions
• Do the readings
• Attend the meetings

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Course Requirements

• To get a grade in the class
• Do the above
• Do one of the following (optionally with the help
  of a faculty member and/or another student)
• Write a publishable survey paper on an emerging
  area of information access.
• Do research that should lead to a publishable
  research paper on a new idea, method, analysis,
  or vision statement for an emerging area of
  information access.
• Implement and/or evaluate code to further an
  information access research project.

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Administrivia

• Sign up sheet
• Readings
• Other questions?

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Outline

• What is Information Access?
• Goals, Tasks, Types of data
• Standard Information Retrieval
• Assumptions, Techniques, Evaluation
• Current Topics
• Candidate topics

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What is Information Access?

• Information Access
• The process by which users use information
  technology to seek, organize, and understand
  information.
• Focus information expressed as text.

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Information Retrieval

• Task Statement
• Build a system that retrieves documents that
  users are likely to find relevant to their
  queries.
• This set of assumptions underlies the field of
  Information Retrieval.

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Information Retrieval Assumptions

• The system has available only pre-existing,
  canned text passages.
• Its response is limited to selecting from these
  passages and presenting them to the user.
• It must select, say, 10 or 20 passages out of
  millions or billions!

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Top 10 Research Issues for IRWhat do people want
from IR?

• By Bruce Croft, DLIB Magazine, Nov 95
• Based on work observations from work on
  public-domain systems, including
• THOMAS
• American Memory Project (Library of Congress)
• The order of importance does not correspond to
  many IR researchers priorities.
• The same can be said for AI researchers.

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Top 10 Research Issues for IR

• Bruce Croft, DLIB Magazine, Nov 95. In
  descending order of importance.
• Integrated Solutions
• Distributed IR
• Efficient, Flexible Indexing and Retreival
• Magic (Effective Vocabulary Expansion)
• Interfaces and Browsing
• Routing and Filtering
• Effective Retrieval
• Multimedia Retrieval
• Information Extraction
• Relevance Feedback

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Other Issues

• Mundane issues are important
• Spelling Correction
• Fast display of initial results
• Less important but more interesting from many
  researchers points of view (Bruce Croft, DLIB
  Magazine, Nov 95)
• Multilingual IR
• Data Mining (in text databases)
• Text Categorization

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Matching Tasks, Collections, and Search Systems

• Typical WWW search is not the whole picture.
• Different information needs require
• different collections
• different search systems and strategies
• Compare
• general WWW
• newswire and magazines
• medical journal articles

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Match Task and Search Type

• WWW Tasks (from www.cnet.com/Content/Reviews/Comp
  are/Seach/ss1a.html)
• Find how-to pages for Doom.
• Purchase plane tickets and hotel for a trip to
  Java.
• Find the top five all-time scoring leaders in the
  national hockey league.
• Find a recipe for potato latkes.
• Find the tide tables for Maui.
• Characteristics
• Timely, specific, found via help from human
  agents and in well-known resources before the WWW.

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Match Task and Search Type

• Newswire Magazine Tasks (from the TREC
  collection)
• Find articles on research into cures for
  osteoporosis.
• Find articles on the effects of recycling of
  tires on the environment.
• Find information on jail and prison overcrowding
  and how inmates are forced to cope with those
  conditions.
• Find discussion of an existing or proposed
  insurance plan (governmental, commercial or
  individual) and the coverage it provides for long
  term care confinements in an institution.
• Characteristics
• Complex combinations of topics.
• Research-oriented
• Either timely or retrospective

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Match Task and Search Type

• MEDLINE Tasks (From OHSUMED, medir.ohsu.edu/pub/o
  hsumed)
• Are there adverse effects on lipids when
  progesterone is given with estrogen replacement
  therapy?
• Pathophysiology and treatment of disseminated
  intravascular coagulation.
• Reviews on subdurals in the elderly.
• Effectiveness of etidronate in treating
  hypercalcemia of malignancy.
• Characteristics
• Research-oriented
• Technical
• Cause and Effect, Implications

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The Problem of Information Access

• Main problem
• Computers cant understand natural language.
• Therefore
• Information access systems must guide users to
  information of interest by approximate methods.
• General common methods
• word match
• topic directories

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Why Text is Tough

• Abstract concepts difficult to represent
• (AI-Complete)
• Countless combinations of subtle, abstract
  relationships among concepts
• Many ways to represent similar concepts
• space ship, flying saucer, UFO, figment of
  imagination
• Concepts are difficult to visualize
• High dimensionality
• Tens or hundreds of thousands of features

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Why Text is Tough

• I saw Pathfinder on Mars with a telescope.
• Pathfinder photographed Mars.
• The Pathfinder photograph mars our perception of
  a lifeless planet.
• The Pathfinder photograph from Ford has arrived.
• The Pathfinder forded the river without marring
  its paint job.

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Outline

• What is Information Access?
• Goals, Tasks, Types of data
• Standard Information Retrieval
• Assumptions, Techniques, Evaluation
• Current Topics
• Candidate topics
• User Interfaces
• Quality Assessment
• Text Data Mining
• Student suggestions

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Tools for Information Access

• User Interfaces
• (information visualization)
• Information Access
• (information retrieval)
• Language and Task Analysis
• Content Analysis

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Current Topics

• User Interfaces
• Incorporating personal information
• Automated Agents vs. User Initiated Steps
• Support for the dynamic process of information
  access
• How to organize large search results
• Categories, clusters, combinations of these
• Question Answering
• Others?

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Current Topics

• Quality Assessment
• Issues
• How to define quality
• Rating methods
• Different fields (medicine, business)
• Techniques
• Visitation patterns and times
• Social techniques
• Link structure (co-citation patterns)
• Link structure content

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Current Topics

• Text Data Mining
• Visualizating the contents of large text
  collections
• Automatically discovering associations within
  text collections
• Discovering useful patterns
• Spotting anomalies
• Finding chains of associated information
• I have a proposal for this

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Current Topics

• Cognitive modeling/AI techniques
• Your idea goes here

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For Next Time

• Do background reading
• Think about which topics to pursue
• I will present more background information