“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…
Preprint on relative upper confidence bound for the K-armed dueling bandit problem online
“Relative upper confidence bound for the K-armed dueling bandit problem” by Masrour Zoghi, Shimon Whiteson, Remi Munos and Maarten de Rijke is online as a preprint at arXiv. This paper proposes a new method for the K-armed dueling bandit problem, a variation on the regular K-armed bandit problem that offers only relative feedback about pairs of…
Best paper award at SocInfo 2013
We received a best paper award at the 5th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2013) for a paper entitled “Automatic thematic content analysis: Finding frames in news”. This a joint paper with Daan Odijk, Bjorn Burscher, Rens Vliegenthart and myself. Congratulations to Daan and Bjorn as they did most of the work. The paper…
Just under two weeks until the ECIR 2014 short paper deadline
Just under two weeks to go until the ECIR 2014 short paper deadline. Six pages LNCS style. Short Paper submissions offer researchers an opportunity to present significant work in progress or research that is best communicated in an interactive or graphical format. Each short paper submission that is accepted for ECIR 2014 will be presented…
CIKM 2013 paper on the world’s playlist online
“Inside the world’s playlist” by Wouter Weerkamp, Manos Tsagkias and Maarten de Rijke is available online now. In the paper we describe Streamwatchr, a real-time system for analyzing the music listening behavior of people around the world. Streamwatchr collects music-related tweets, extracts artists and songs, and visualizes the results in three ways: (i) currently trending songs and…
Living Labs’13 paper on Lerot, an online learning to rank framework, online
“Lerot: An online learning to rank framework” by Anne Schuth, Katja Hofmann (Microsoft Research), Shimon Whiteson and Maarten de Rijke is available online now. Online learning to rank methods for IR allow retrieval systems to optimize their own performance directly from interactions with users via click feedback. In the software package Lerot, presented in this paper, we…
CIKM 2013 paper on evaluating search using interleaving online
“Evaluating aggregated search using interleaving” by Aleksandr Chuklin (Google), Anne Schuth, Katja Hofmann (Microsoft Research), Pavel Serdyukov (Yandex) and Maarten de Rijke is available online now. A result page of a modern web search engine is often much more complicated than a simple list of “ten blue links.” In particular, a search engine may combine results from…
TPDL 2013 paper on entity network extraction online
“Entity network extraction based on association finding and relation extraction” by Ridho Reinanda, Marta Utama, Fridus Steijlen (KITLV) and Maarten de Rijke will be presented at TPDL 2013 and is available online now. One of the core aims of semantic search is to directly present users with information instead of lists of documents. Various entity-oriented tasks have…