Search As You Type
                             Chen Li
                           U.C. Irvine

Traditional information systems return answers after a user submits a
complete query. Users often feel "left in the dark" when they have
limited knowledge about the underlying data, and have to use a
try-and-see approach for finding information. A recent trend of
supporting autocomplete in these systems is a first step towards
solving this problem. In this talk we will discuss a new
information-access paradigm, "search as you type," which allows users
to search and explore underlying data as they type in query keywords.
We focus on how to answer queries while meeting two requirements:
(1) Error tolerant: finding results with keywords matching query
keywords approximately; (2) Full-text: allowing query keywords to
appear at various places in relevant answers. We will present our
developed techniques to answer such queries on large data sets
efficiently (within milliseconds per query) in order to achieve an
interactive speed. For illustration purposes, we will demonstrate
several systems powered by these techniques, including:
http://psearch.ics.uci.edu: Search interface on the UC Irvine
directory
http://ipubmed.ics.uci.edu: Search interface on more
than 18 million MEDLINE publications
http://fr.ics.uci.edu/haiti: Search interface for Family
Reunification for Haiti Earthquake