The Role of Info Pros in Information Retrieval: From Text to Thought, Presented by Joyce Ward
The Roger Summit Lecture Award is funded by AIIP Past Presidents to bring an inspiring and stimulating speaker to the AIIP Annual Conference. Roger Summit, the founder of Dialog—a pioneer in online information retrieval—and a longtime AIIP supporter, has inspired AIIP members with his demonstrations of self-renewal and continual learning. The 2020 recipient of the award, Joyce Ward, rolled with the punches after our conference was cancelled due to COVID-19 and delivered her lecture virtually on May 5th, 2020.
Joyce has 30+ years of experience in knowledge management and information retrieval technologies. She served as a VP of Enterprise Products and director of Content Classification at Northern Light, a product manager and director of Taxonomies and Semantic Enrichment at LexisNexis, and most recently as a senior ontologist and content specialist with the Amazon Search Knowledge team. She shared her deep expertise with AIIP members as she reviewed the role information professionals have played in bringing excellent search results to users of search engines.
Joyce recognized the role Roger Summit played in her own career as Dialog revolutionized research and led her into the world of taxonomies. She shared that search has evolved greatly and now produces more relevant results for complex, ambiguous queries. Joyce adds that, thanks to the information professionals working in the background, search results have a high level of precision despite complex data sets, ambiguous search queries, and algorithms that favor quantity over quality.
Information professionals advocate for the users through their understanding of the users’ vocabulary and what users see as good answers. We also look for patterns to improve search results.
Information professionals provide the machines with structured knowledge—classification schemes, taxonomies, rubrics, and blacklists, for example—which are used to develop models for improved search experiences Human classifiers are always better than machines, and precision in search results is directly due to their expertise.
Information professionals are experts who integrate diverse collections of content and map metadata to build filters that refine large data sets into relevant results. Their work ensures result sets are more than merely lists of “hits” and they are organized to make them more relevant to users.
Joyce suggested that there are opportunities for information professionals who are interested in taxonomy and ontology. There will be a new generation of search that is “accurate, intelligent, and well-mannered” and that will need the deep understanding of structured knowledge and subject expertise that is the domain of the information professional.
Phyllis Smith is a partner in ITK Vector Inc. in Ontario, Canada. She is currently developing her “encore career” working with empty nesters who want to reflect on their own life experiences and share them through stories and photos.
