pick a good ir research problem

2008 © ChengXiang Zhai Dragon Star Lecture at Beijing University, June 21-30, 2008 1

Pick a Good IR Research Problem

ChengXiang ZhaiDepartment of Computer Science

Graduate School of Library & Information Science

Institute for Genomic Biology, Statistics

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

http://www-faculty.cs.uiuc.edu/~czhai, [email protected]

http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/


What is a Good Research Problem?

• Well-defined: Would we be able to tell whether we’ve solved the problem?

• Highly important: Who would care about the solution to the problem? What would happen if we don’t solve the problem?

• Solvable: Is there any clue about how to solve it? Do you have a baseline approach? Do you have the needed resources?

• Matching your strength: Are you at a good position to solve the problem?



Challenge-Impact Analysis

Level of Challenges

Impact/Usefulness

Known

UnknownGood applications

Not interestingfor research

High impactLow risk (easy)

Good short-termresearch problems

High impactHigh risk (hard)Good long-term

research problemsDifficult

basic researchProblems,

but questionable impact

Low impactLow risk

Bad research problems(May not be publishable)

Your research proposal



How to Find a Problem?

• Application-driven (Find a nail, then make a hammer)

– Identify a need by people/users that cannot be satisfied well currently (“complaints” about current data/information management systems?)

– How difficult is it to solve the problem?

• No big technical challenges: do a startup

• Lots of big challenges: write a research proposal

– Identify one technical challenge as your topic

– Formulate/frame the problem appropriately so that you can solve it

• Aim at a completely new application/function (find a high-stake nail)



How to Find a Problem? (cont.) • Tool-driven (Hold a hammer, and look for a nail)

– Choose your favorite state-of-the-art tools • Ideally, you have a “secret weapon”

• Otherwise, bring tools from area X to area Y

– Look around for possible applications

– Find a novel application that seems to match your tools

– How difficult is it to use your tools to solve the problem? • No big technical challenges: do a startup

• Lots of big challenges: write a research proposal

– Identify one technical challenge as your topic

– Formulate/frame the problem appropriately so that you can solve it

• Aim at important extension of the tool (find an unexpected application and use the best hammer)



How to Find a Problem? (cont.)

• In practice, you do both in various kinds of ways

– You talk to people in application domains and identify new “nails”

– You take courses and read books to acquire new “hammers”

– You check out related areas for both new “nails” and new “hammers”

– You read visionary papers and the “future work” sections of research papers, and then take a problem from there

– …



Three Basic Questions to Ask about an IR Problem

• Who are the users?– Everyone vs. Small group of people

• What data do we have?– Web (whole web vs. sub-web)

– Email (public email vs. personal email)

– Literature (general vs. special discipline)

– Blog, forum, …

• What functions do we want to support?– Information access vs. knowledge acquisition

– Decision and task support

Everyone (who has an Internet connection)

The whole web (indexed by Google)

Search (by keywords)



Map of IR Applications

Web pages

News articles

Email messages

Literature

Organization docs

Legal docs/Patents

Medical records

Customer complaint letter/transcripts

…

KidsPeking Univ. community

Lawyers Scientists

Search Browsing Alert MiningTask/Decision

support

CustomerServicePeople

Email management+ automatic reply

“Google Kids”

Legal InfoSystems

LiteratureAssistant

IntranetSearch

LocalWeb

Service

Blog articles

OnlineShoppers

?



High-Level Challenges in IR

• How to make use of imperfect IR techniques to do something useful?

– Save human labor (e.g., partially automate a task)

– Create “add on” value (e.g., literature alert)

– A lot of HCI issues (e.g., allowing users to control)

• How to develop robust, effective, and efficient methods for a particular application?

– Methods need to “work all the time” without failure

– Methods need to be accurate enough to be useful

– Methods need to be efficient enough to be useful



Challenge 1: From Search to Information Access

• Search is only one way to access information

• Browsing and recommendation are two other ways

• How can we effectively combine these three ways to provided integrated information access?

• E.g., artificially linking search results with additional hyperlinks, “literature pop-ups”…



Challenge 2: From Information Access to Task Support

• The purpose of accessing information is often to perform some tasks

• How can we go beyond information access to support a user at the task level?

• E.g., automatic/semi-automatic email reply for customer service, literature information service for paper writing (suggest relevant citations, term definitions, etc), comparing prices for shoppers



Challenge 3: Support Whole Life Cycle of Information

• A life cycle of information consists of “creation”, “storage”, “transformation”, “consumption”, “recycling”, etc

• Most existing applications support one stage (e.g., search supports “consumption”)

• How can we support the whole life cycle in an integrated way?

• E.g., Community publication/subscription service (no need for crawling, user profiling)



Challenge 4: Collaborative Information Management

• Users (especially similar users) often have similar information need

• Users who have explored the information space can share their experiences with other users

• How to exploit the collective expertise of users and allow users to help each other?

• E.g., allowing “information annotation” on the Web (“footprints”), collaborative filtering/retrieval,



Optimizing “Research Return”:Pick a Problem Best for You

Your Passion

High (Potential)

Impact

Your Strength

Best problems for you

Find your passion: If you don’t have to work/study for money, what would you do?

Test of impact: If you are given $1M to fund a research project, what would you fund?

Find your strength: If you don’t know your strength, at least avoid your weakness; acquire strength through training



Next Lecture :Formulate IR Research Hypothese


pick a good ir research problem

Documents