Making a simple question into a complicated query

Making a simple question into a complicated query

Richard BoultonLemur Consulting Ltd





Only 20 minutes until Lunch

Where shall we have Lunch?

“Lunch”

Assertion

Complicated questions areeasier to answer well.

Assertion

Complicated questions areeasier to answer well accurately.

� Restaurant � Pizza restaurant near Covent Garden, fairly cheap.

Time for a real example

http://mydeco.com/

Interior decoration site

� Users type: “Sofa”

� We'd prefer them to ask questions like: “Red velvet, three seater, sofa, from a supplier who can deliver to central Cambridge at a weekend”.

� How can we move to this kind of search?

Getting more from users


� Suggested search completions


� Facets


� Facets

� Which facets to display?

− Depends on the user.

� Which facet values are interesting?

− A particularly fun problem for continuous numeric values, like price.

� How many values should we display?

− Based on likelihood of any being useful?


� Personal data

− Using details about the user directly.

� e.g., Postcode

− Grouping users by similarity of interests


� Similarity search

− “More like this”

− Colour / image-based similarity

Behind the scenes

� Applying our own bias.

− Perhaps we want to push some items

− Perhaps we want to avoid other items

− Perhaps some items go well together

− Behave like a shop assistant

− “Product Rank”

Behind the scenes

� Categorisation

− User asks for “Sofa”.

− We search for “Products categorised as one of the sofa subcategories, based on the output of a machine learning system trained with some human judgements”.

Behind the scenes

� Variety

− Don't display lots of very similar items

− Give the user a choice

− But don't display irrelevant junk, either!

− Need some way to measure variety

Answering complicated questions


� Getting the best answer

− Good models

− Careful design

− Lots of tuning


� Getting an answer quickly

− Good algorithms

− Well matched data-structures

− Plenty of machines

− Plenty of RAM

Questions, and then Lunch!


[email protected]

Documents

Making a simple question into a complicated query