ON THE EFFECT OF SOCIAL AND PHYSICAL DETACHMENT ON INFORMATION NEED

ELAD YOM-TOV

Yahoo Research

The information need of users and the documents which answer it are
frequently contingent on the different characteristics of users. This is
especially evident during natural disasters, such as earthquakes and
violent weather incidents, which create a strong transient information
need. In this talk I will describe how the information need of users is
affected by their physical and social detachment from the event. Drawing
on large-scale data from three major events, I will show that social and
physical detachment levels of users are a major influence on their
information needs, as manifested by their search engine queries. I will
demonstrate that knowing social and physical detachment levels can assist
in improving retrieval for two applications: identifying search queries
related to events and ranking results in response to event-related
queries. Finally, I will discuss the relationship of social and mainstream
media to user queries, and show similarities and differences between the
three information sources.

BIO

Elad Yom-Tov is a Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo Research. Before
joining Yahoo in 2010, he was with the Machine Learning group at IBM
Research Haifa Lab and Rafael. Dr. Yom-Tov received his B.Sc. from
Tel-Aviv University and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from Technion - Israel
Institute of Technology. Dr. Yom-Tov has co-authored two books and over 40
publications in top international conferences and journals, and filed over
30 patents (6 of which have been granted so far). Two of his papers won
top prizes in their respective venues. His primary research interests are
in large-scale Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, and in the past
few years, social analysis.