MENLO PARK, Calif. — Human behavior is Facebook’s business.
Its success is based on understanding how people are wired: how they present themselves, what they remember, whom they trust, and now, how they seek information.
Facebook this month introduced a search tool to help users find answers to many kinds of questions. But before it did, it assembled an eclectic team to scrutinize what users were searching for on the site - and how.
The team included two linguists, a Ph.D. in psychology and statisticians, along with the usual cadre of programmers. Their mission was ambitious but clear: teach Facebook’s computers how to communicate better with people.
Kathryn Hymes, 25, who left a master’s program in linguistics at Stanford to join the team in late 2011, said the goal was to create “this natural, intuitive language.” She was joined last March by Amy Campbell, who earned a doctorate in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley.
When the team began its work, Facebook’s largely ineffective search engine understood only “robospeak,” as Hymes put it, and not how people actually talk. The machine had to be taught the building blocks of questions, a bit like the way schoolchildren are taught to diagram asentence. The code had to be restructured altogether.
Loren Cheng, 39, who led what is known as the natural language processing part of the project, said the search engine had to adjust to the demands of users, a great variety of them, considering Facebook’s mass appeal.
“It used to be you had to go to the computer on the computer’s terms,” Cheng said. “Now it’s the user.”
The heart of the research took place in a lab at the Facebook offices. Hidden behind one-way glass, team members watched users playing with different versions of a search engine and filled notebooks with observations. On occasion, the engineers tore out their hair.
They consulted dictionaries, newspapers and parliamentary proceedings to grasp the almost infinite variety of ways people posed questions. Then they trained the algorithms to understand what was meant. They tested tweaks to the search tool, as they do with every product, and measured how certain groups of people responded.
Business, Pages 11 on 02/04/2013