Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation


  Machine Learning Applications for Improving Web Search

Mehran Sahami
Google, Inc.
and
Computer Science Department
Stanford University

Web search is one of the most important applications used on the Internet, and it also poses many interesting opportunities to apply machine learning. In order to better help people find relevant information in a growing sea of data, we discuss how various machine learning techniques that can be harnessed to sift, organize, and present relevant information to users. In this talk, we provide a brief background on information retrieval, and then look at some of the challenges faced in searching the Web. We specifically examine applications of machine learning to aid text retrieval, image classification, topical inference of short text snippets, and record linkage. We show how these tasks are directly related to the overarching goal of improving various aspects of search on the Web.


Date: Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Time: 4:15-5:30PM

Place: Gates 104


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