Information Retrieval as Interaction
Abstract: Modern Information Retrieval (IR) systems, such as search engines, recommender systems, and conversational agents, are best thought of as interactive systems. And their development is best thought of as a two-stage development process: offline development followed by continued online adaptation and development based on interactions with users. In this lecture, I will sketch a rich landscape of offline and online topics that any student interested in IR system development should be familiar with. We discuss IR scenarios such as search, recommender systems, conversational interaction, and topics such as query and interaction mining and understanding, offline and online evaluation, and offline and online learning to rank. The lecture is based on material developed with Evangelos Kanoulas, Ilya Markov, and Harrie Oosterhuis.
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Short Bio: Maarten de Rijke is University Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Information Retrieval at the University of Amsterdam and Director of the Information and Language Processing Systems lab. De Rijke’s research strives to build ever more intelligent technology to connect people to information. His team pushes the frontiers of search engines, recommender systems and digital assistants. His team also investigates the influence of the technology they develop on society. De Rijke is the director and a co-founder of the national Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence (ICAI) and a former director of Amsterdam Data Science.