How search logs can help improve future searches
In the European project Vitalas, we had the opportunity to analyze the search log data from a commercial picture portal of a European news agency, which offers access to photographic images to professional users. I will discuss how these logs can be used in various ways to improve image search: to expand the image representation, to make suggestions of alternative queries, to adapt the search results to user context, and to build automatically concept detectors for content-based image retrieval. I also present recent work on using the semantic information that has become publicly available in the form of linked data to improve the search log analysis. The results show that bringing in linked data gives insights beyond the more common term-based analysis, since queries related in the most frequent ways do not usually share terms. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for improving log analysis, image collection management, and search engine design.
The guest lecture takes place on 20 October 2010 at 13.45 h. in ZI-2126.