March 25, 2008 - Peter Anick

Title: Exploiting the Power of Search Engines for Real-Time Concept Association Tasks

Abstract:
Web search engines sift through billions of documents to identify those most likely to be relevant to a short natural language query. This functionality can be exploited to relate queries not just to documents but also to other concepts and queries. In this talk, we describe several applications of this principle, including the generation of query refinement suggestions for interactive search assistance and the discovery of alternative descriptors for an advertiser’s product space.