Searching on Intent - Trey Grainger

Title: Searching on Intent: Knowledge Graphs, Personalization, and Contextual Disambiguation

Abstract:Search engines frequently miss the mark when it comes to understanding user intent. This talk will walk through some of the key building blocks necessary to turn a search engine into a dynamically-learning "intent engine", able to interpret and search on meaning, not just keywords. We will walk through CareerBuilder's semantic search architecture, including semantic autocomplete, query and document interpretation, probabilistic query parsing, automatic taxonomy discovery, keyword disambiguation, and personalization based upon user context/behavior. We will also see how to leverage an inverted index (Lucene/Solr) as a knowledge graph that can be used as a dynamic ontology to extract phrases, understand and weight the semantic relationships between those phrases and known entities, and expand the query to include those additional conceptual relationships.
As an example, most search engines completely miss the mark at parsing a query like (Senior Java Developer Portland, OR Hadoop). We will show how to dynamically understand that "senior" designates an experience level, that "java developer" is a job title related to "software engineering", that "portland, or" is a city with a specific geographical boundary (as opposed to a keyword followed by a boolean operator), and that "hadoop" is the skill "Apache Hadoop", which is also related to other terms like "hbase", "hive", and "map/reduce". We will discuss how to train the search engine to parse the query into this intended understanding and how to reflect this understanding to the end user to provide an insightful, augmented search experience.

Topics: Semantic Search, Apache Solr, Finite State Transducers, Probabilistic Query Parsing, Bayes Theorem, Augmented Search, Recommendations, Query Disambiguation, NLP, Knowledge Graphs

Trey Grainger

Trey Grainger is the Director of Engineering over Search & Recommendations at CareerBuilder.com and is the co-author of Solr in Action (2014, Manning Publications), the comprehensive example-driven guide to Apache Solr. His search experience includes handling multi-lingual content across dozens of markets/languages, machine learning, semantic search, big data analytics, customized Lucene/Solr scoring models, data mining, and recommendation systems. Trey is also an advisor to several startups, is the founder of Celiaccess.com, a gluten-free search engine, and is a frequent public speaker on topics related to open source search, information retrieval, and recommendation systems.

6:30 Eat & Greet

7:00 Talk - Great speakers, good food, free beer.

Event will be held at the eBay campus just off 17/880 @ Hamilton in the main Community building. Look for lobby/flagpole.

Wifi: eBayGuest/BuyItNow!

I'm always looking for speakers. Please suggest speakers or topics you would like to hear.