After Tuesday’s talk on personal data mining, I gave another talk to non-experts on Thursday. This time the topic was “The Autonomous Search Engine”. The backbone of the story is the move from supervised to weakly supervised technology development of one of the core components of search engines: rankers. Weak supervision in this context means that we’re not using explicit, manually created labels provided by experts but that we’re making inferences about our ranker technology from naturally occurring interactions with the search engine.
Weakly supervised ways of evaluating rankers and weakly supervised ways of learning to combined the outputs of multiple rankers are being studied a lot. And solutions are being used outside the lab. The next holy grail here is to create new rankers in a weakly supervised way, again based on the implicit signals that we get from user interactions. The audience, consisting of information professionals for whom expert judgments are the norm, was obviously critical but interested, with a number of great questions and a range of suggestions. Thank you!
Now playing: The Durutti Column — Stuki