“Blending Vertical and Web results: A Case Study using Video Intent” by Damien Lefortier, Pavel Serdyukov, Fedor Romanenko and Maarten de Rijke is available online now. Modern search engines aggregate results from specialized verticals into the Web search results. We study a setting where vertical and Web results are blended into a single result list, a setting…
Month: January 2014
ECIR 2014 paper on query-dependent contextualization of streaming data online
“Query-dependent contextualization of streaming data” by Nikos Voskarides, Daan Odijk, Manos Tsagkias, Wouter Weerkamp and Maarten de Rijke is available online. We propose a method for linking entities in a stream of short textual documents that takes into account context both inside a document and inside the history of documents seen so far. Our method uses a…
ECIR 2014 paper on cluster-based fusion for microblog search online
“The impact of semantic document expansion on cluster-based fusion for microblog search” by Shangsong Liang, Zhaochun Ren and Maarten de Rijke is available online now. Searching microblog posts, with their limited length and creative language usage, is challenging. We frame the microblog search problem as a data fusion problem. We examine the effectiveness of a recent cluster-based…
ECIR 2014 paper on predicting new concepts in social streams online
“Generating Pseudo-ground Truth for Predicting New Concepts in Social Streams” by David Graus, Manos Tsagkias, Lars Buitinck and Maarten de Rijke is available online now. The manual curation of knowledge bases is a bottleneck in fast paced domains where new concepts constantly emerge. Identification of nascent concepts is important for improving early entity linking, content interpretation, and…
ECIR 2014 paper on click-based recommender evaluation online
“Effects of Position Bias on Click-Based Recommender Evaluation” by Katja Hofmann, Anne Schuth, Alejandro Bellogin and Maarten de Rijke is available online now. Measuring the quality of recommendations produced by a recommender system (RS) is challenging. Labels used for evaluation are typically obtained from users of a RS, by asking for explicit feedback, or inferring labels from…
Going out with Streamwatchr
A few weeks ago I visited a local high school as part of a series of efforts to get more high school kids to maintain an interest in computer science and possibly study the subject in university. I gave a sneak preview of a new version of a demo that we’ve been working on with…
ECIR 2014 paper on optimizing base rankers using clicks online
“Optimizing Base Rankers Using Clicks: A Case Study Using BM25” by Anne Schuth, Floor Sietsma, Shimon Whiteson and Maarten de Rijke is available online now. We study the problem of optimizing an individual base ranker using clicks. Surprisingly, while there has been considerable attention for using clicks to optimize linear combinations of base rankers, the problem of…
WSDM 2014 paper on efficient on-line ranker evaluation online
“Relative Confidence Sampling for Efficient On-Line Ranker Evaluation” by Masrour Zoghi, Shimon Whiteson, Maarten de Rijke and Remi Munos is available online now. A key challenge in information retrieval is that of on-line ranker evaluation: determining which one of a finite set of rankers performs the best in expectation on the basis of user clicks on presented document…