CIKM 2010 in Toronto, ON, Canada

I'm back from Toronto, where a few of us attended the CIKM 2010 conference last week. On Friday, I presented our paper on "Selectively diversifying Web search results", a joint work with Craig Macdonald and Iadh Ounis. This work extends our successful participation in the diversity task of the TREC 2009 Web track, by investigating the need for search result diversification in the first place. In particular, we proposed a novel supervised learning approach to predict not only whether promoting diversity is beneficial, but also how much diversification should be applied to attain an effective retrieval performance on a per-query basis. After thorough, large-scale experiments with over 900 query features, we found that our selective approach can substantially improve existing diversification approaches, including our state-of-the-art xQuAD framework. Nonetheless, we believe the significance of our contribution goes beyond these successful results. Indeed, it was with great pleasure that we heard from the NTCIR organisers that NTCIR-9 will run an Intent task, aimed---among other things---at selectively diversifying search results, an area where we are proud to be pioneers.

Besides our own paper, a few other papers caught my attention:

• Web Search Solved? All Result Rankings the Same? by Hugo Zaragoza, B. Barla Cambazoglu and Ricardo Baeza-Yates
• Reverted Indexing for Feedback and Expansion, by Jeremy Pickens, Matthew Cooper and Gene Golovchinsky
• Rank Learning for Factoid Question Answering with Linguistic and Semantic Constraints, by Matthew Bilotti, Jonathan Elsas, Jaime Carbonell and Eric Nyberg
• Organizing Query Completions for Web Search, by Alpa Jain and Gilad Mishne
• Clickthrough-Based Translation Models for Web Search: from Word Models to Phrase Models, by Jianfeng Gao, Xiaodong He and Jian-Yun Nie

The conference also featured great keynotes, of which those by Jamie Callan and Susan Dumais deserve a particular mention. Jamie talked about his view for the future of search, in which search engines capable of fully leveraging the structure of queries and documents would enable more sophisticated applications built on top of them. Susan addressed the temporal evolution of Web content, how it impacts the way users access this content, and how test collections should account for it. For more details, have a look at the excellent posts by Gene Golovchinsky on Jamie and Susan's talks.

Last but not least, many of us were involved in promoting the next edition of CIKM, to be held here in Glasgow. There was a lot of excitement from the several people that visited our booth, and also during the hand-over talk at the end of the conference. Well done Jon, Mary, Craig, and Iadh for the hard work! The arrangements for CIKM 2011 are well advanced, and the call for papers is now online. You can also follow the latest news about CIKM 2011 on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Lanyrd. We look forward to welcoming you all to Glasgow next year!

Terrier Team at SIGIR 2010 in Geneva

SIGIR 2010 has just started in Geneva. From the TerrierTeam, Richard and myself are attending.

On Monday, Richard presented his PhD topic, Leveraging User-generated Content for News Search at the doctoral consortium.

Later, at the Web Ngram workshop, I'll be presenting a paper on Global Statistics in Proximity Weighting Models.

About the same time, Richard will be presenting at the Crowdsourcing for Search Evaluation workshop. His paper on Crowdsourcing a News Query Classification Dataset examines the effectiveness of different interfaces for having Mechanical Turkers classify queries as news-related or not.

Last but not least, and continuing on our proximity theme, Nicola Tonellotto from CNR is presenting our joint work titled Efficient Dynamic Pruning with Proximity Support at the Large Scale & Distributed Systems workshop.

Meanwhile, please say hello if you see us at the conference, or stay up to date by following #sigir2010. And remember, if you are near the registration desk, please pick up flyers for Terrier and CIKM 2011.

Top Authors in Information Retrieval

Thanks to Sérgio Nunes who alerted us to this ranking by Microsoft Academic Search of the Top Authors in Information Retrieval, in the past 5 years.

According to this recent ranking, two members of the TerrierTeam, namely Iadh Ounis and Craig Macdonald, are in the top 5 authors in Information Retrieval in the past 5 years (position #1 and #4, respectively). The ranking is based on in-domain citations.

This good news comes just at the start of the SIGIR 2010 Conference, which will be held in Geneva, Switzerland this week (19-23 July 2010). Several members of the team will be in attendance.

WWW 2010 in Raleigh, NC, USA

I am back from the sunny Raleigh, NC, USA. Besides the nice weather, I had a great time last week attending the 19th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2010), where I presented our paper on Exploiting query reformulations for Web search result diversification, a joint work with Craig Macdonald and Iadh Ounis. The paper introduces a probabilistic formulation of our xQuAD framework for search result diversification, and analyses the effectiveness of query reformulations provided by three commercial search engines for the diversification task. My talk was very well received, with lots of questions from the audience, and subsequent chatting with many people from both academia and industry.

The blend academia-industry was indeed a signature of WWW. I was also impressed with the multidisciplinary nature of the conference—with up to five parallel sessions, there was always something for everyone! In particular, from the sessions I attended, a few papers caught my attention:

• Clustering query refinements by user intent, by Eldar Sadikov et al. (Stanford University and Google)
• Optimal rare query suggestion with implicit user feedback, by Yang Song and Li-wei He (Microsoft Research)
• Building taxonomy of Web search intents for name entity queries, by Xiaoxin Yin and Sarthak Shah (Microsoft Research)
• Exploring Web scale language models for search query processing, by Jian Huang et al. (Microsoft Research Asia, Facebook, and Penn State University)
• Classification-enhanced ranking, by Paul N. Bennett et al. (Microsoft Research)
• Ranking specialization for Web search: A divide-and-conquer approach by using topical RankSVM, by Jiang Bian et al. (Georgia Tech and Yahoo! Labs)
• Generalized distances between rankings, by Ravi Kumar and Sergei Vassilvitskii (Yahoo! Research)
• Relational duality: Unsupervised extraction of semantic relations between entities on the Web, by Danushka T. Bollegala et al. (University of Tokyo)

The conference also featured three passionate keynotes:

• Vint Cerf discussed a broad range of topics of interest on today's Web, where everything is connected: 1.8 billion users, around a billion Web-enabled mobile devices, and still a large room for growth in developing countries. Touched points included the implications of the explosion of data production on mobility, accessibility, security and privacy, intellectual property, digital preservation, as well as new technologies (e.g., cloud computing).
• dannah boyd discussed privacy implications of the availability of "big data". Her keynote revolved around common misconceptions associated with the analysis of data produced by online social activities, as well as ethical concerns related to using this data in the first place, "just because it is accessible".
• Carl Malamud from public.resource.org described his experiences trying to convince seven bureaucratic institutions to make public data publicly accessible. His keynote was organised around "10 rules for radicals", a guide on how to break the barriers towards negotiating with bureaucrats.

On Thursday night, the conference banquet featured an exciting performance by the North Carolina string band Carolina Chocolate Drops. Check out Snowden's Jig (Genuine Negro Jig) and Don't get trouble in your mind for a taste.

Friday held the closing ceremony, with the announcement of the award winners.
Best Paper:

• Factorizing personalized Markov chains for next-basket recommendation, by Steffen Rendle, Christoph Freudenthaler, and Lars Schmidt-Thieme (Osaka University and University of Hildesheim)

Best Student Paper:

• Privacy wizards for social networking sites, by Lujun Fang and Kristen LeFevre (University of Michigan)

Best Posters:

• How much is your personal recommendation worth, by Paul Dütting, Monika Henzinger and Ingmar Weber (EPFL Lausanne, University of Vienna, and Yahoo! Research)
• SourceRank: Relevance and trust assessment for deep Web sources based on inter-source agreement, by Raju Balakrishnan and Subbarao Kambhampati (Arizona State University)

The closing ceremony also featured a short presentation of WWW 2011, to be held in Hyderabad, India. WWW 2012 will take place in Lyon, France.

Finally, on Saturday, the IW3C2 announced the Brazilian bid as the winner to host WWW 2013, which I was very glad to hear about!

RIAO 2010 in Paris, France.

The 9th International RIAO Conference has started in Paris, France (28-30 April, 2010). It is unfortunate that it is being held concurrently with WWW 2010 in Raleigh.

The first RIAO conference was held in Grenoble in 1985. RIAO is currently a triennial conference, addressing Information Retrieval research topics of interest to both Academia and Industry. This year, the conference focuses on Adaptivity, Personalization and Fusion of Heterogeneous Information.

The following papers have caught my eyes, while browsing the RIAO 2010 program:

• Boiling down information retrieval test collections. T. Sakai et al. (Microsoft Research Asia, CMU)
• Improving tag recommendation using social networks. A. Rae et al. (The Open University, Yahoo! Research Barcelona).
• Analysis of robustness in trust-based recommender systems. Z. Cheng and N. Hurley (UCD)
• Opinion-finding in blogs: A passage-based language modelling approach. M. Saad Missen et al (IRIT)
• Predicting query performance using query, result, and user interaction features. Q. Guo et al. (Emory University/Microsoft Research)
• Towards a collection-based results diversification. J.A. Akinyemi et al. (University of Waterloo)

In addition, the TerrierTeam has two full papers, which are being presented today at the conference (hopefully, the slides will follow shortly):

• Voting for Related Entities by R.L.T. Santos, C. Macdonald and I. Ounis. The paper addresses the problem of entity search, where the goal is to rank not documents, but entities in response to a given query. The paper proposes to tackle this problem as a voting process, by considering the occurrence of an entity among the top ranked documents for a given query as a vote for the existence of a relationship between this and the entity in the query. The approach led to high precision and unparalleled recall compared to TREC 2009 systems.
• News Article Ranking: Leveraging the Wisdom of Bloggers by R. McCreadie, C.Macdonald and I. Ounis. The paper investigates how news article ranking can be performed automatically, so as to assist editors in selecting the articles, which should make the front page of their newspaper. In particular, the paper investigates the blogosphere as a prime source of evidence, on the intuition that bloggers, and by extension their blog posts, can indicate interest in one news article or another. The paper proposes to model the automatic news article ranking task as a voting process, where each relevant blog post acts as a vote for one or more news articles. The approach led to the best TREC 2009 retrieval performance in the Blog track.

Craig Macdonald is tweeting the conference, pending an appropriate wireless signal. You can follow some bits of the RIAO conference through the #riao2010 hashtag.