Browsing Theses by Supervisor "Smucker, Mark"
Now showing items 1-11 of 11
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Answering Consumer Health Questions on the Web
(University of Waterloo, 2022-12-21)Question answering is an important sub task in the field of information retrieval. Question answering has typically used reliable sources of information such as the Wikipedia for information. In this work, we look at ... -
Filtering News from Document Streams: Evaluation Aspects and Modeled Stream Utility
(University of Waterloo, 2016-08-04)Events like hurricanes, earthquakes, or accidents can impact a large number of people. Not only are people in the immediate vicinity of the event affected, but concerns about their well-being are shared by the local ... -
Health Misinformation in Search and Social Media
(University of Waterloo, 2019-11-28)People increasingly rely on the Internet in order to search for and share health-related information. Indeed, searching for and sharing information about medical treatments are among the most frequent uses of online data. ... -
Increasing the Efficiency of High-Recall Information Retrieval
(University of Waterloo, 2019-04-30)The goal of high-recall information retrieval (HRIR) is to find all, or nearly all, relevant documents while maintaining reasonable assessment effort. Achieving high recall is a key problem in the use of applications ... -
An Investigation of Preference Judging Consistency
(University of Waterloo, 2023-04-12)Preference judging has been proposed as an effective method to identify the most relevant documents for a given search query. In this thesis, we investigate the degree to which assessors using a preference judging system ... -
Offline Evaluation via Human Preference Judgments: A Dueling Bandits Problem
(University of Waterloo, 2022-11-22)The dramatic improvements in core information retrieval tasks engendered by neural rankers create a need for novel evaluation methods. If every ranker returns highly relevant items in the top ranks, it becomes difficult ... -
Reducing Health Misinformation in Search Results
(University of Waterloo, 2022-08-22)People commonly search the web for answers to health-related questions. With health information being added to the Internet every day, misinformation proliferates and disseminates wildly. Previous work has shown that if ... -
Refresh Strategies in Continuous Active Learning
(University of Waterloo, 2018-08-27)High recall information retrieval is crucial to tasks such as electronic discovery and systematic review. Continuous Active Learning (CAL) is a technique where a human assessor works in loop with a machine learning model; ... -
Studying Relevance Judging Behavior of Secondary Assessors
(University of Waterloo, 2016-08-03)Secondary assessors, individuals who do not originate search topics and are employed solely to judge the relevancy of documents, have been found to differ in their relevance judgments. Their relevance judgments are used ... -
Users, Queries, and Bad Abandonment in Web Search
(University of Waterloo, 2021-11-18)After a user submits a query and receives a list of search results, the user may abandon their query without clicking on any of the search results. A bad query abandonment is when a searcher abandons the SERP because they ... -
Using a Credibility Classifier to Improve Health-Related Information Retrieval
(University of Waterloo, 2020-08-19)In this thesis, we address improving the credibility and correctness of information retrieved by search engines in health-related searches. Health misinformation presented in the search engine results pages (SERPs) is a ...