Open Tech Calendar

- Speaker Bio:

Tracy trained in linguistics at Stanford and worked as a researcher and research manager in PARC's Natural Language Theory and Technology group. She then moved into applied research in Microsoft's Bing search team. She was a product manager and an engineering manager in the Search Science applied research team at eBay, focusing on eCommerce search across the eBay sites. At A9 and Amazon, she focused on natural language processing for product search query understanding and then on utilization for sponsored products. Currently she is a principal scientist at Adobe working on search and natural language processing.

- Abstract

To those outside the field, search seems like a solved problem. You type a few keywords into Google and you usually get exactly what you want in the top results, no scrolling required. However, when searching over private document collections such as your own files, over non-textual data like images or tables, or in languages other than English, the quality of search results degrades rapidly. In addition, we expect increasingly more from search: we want answers to our questions and recommendations of what to view next. In this talk I discuss why search is hard (and correspondingly fascinating) and how these challenges are being addressed in the industry.