ECIR 2011, hosted in Dublin, Ireland, is over. It was a great week with lots of opportunities for scientific exchange, discussion and the occasional pint of fresh Guinness.
While there was a large number of interesting publications presented at the conference, this is a short list of my personal favourite talks:
- Stephen Robertson – On the Contribution of Topics to System Evaluation
An analysis of the usefulness of given topics for IR system evaluation. The conclusion is, that there does not seem to be a general property that makes a topic more or less discriminative in terms of system evaluation. An interesting example of a “negative results paper” constructing a strong case and being accepted for publication. - Jaime Arguello et al. – A Methodology for Evaluating Aggregated Search Results (Best Student Paper)
A method for evaluation of search interfaces that aggregate results from multiple verticals based on pairwise comparison. User studies show a high correlation between the proposed method and holistic, page-wide human judgements. - Jagadeesh Jagarlamudi et al. – Fractional Similarity: Cross-Lingual Feature Selection for Search
A method for improving foreign (as in non-English) search result ranking by gathering hints from equivalent rankings in more frequently-observed languages. - Kamran Massoudi et al. – Incorporating Query Expansion and Quality Indicators in Searching Microblog Posts
The authors identify a range of features (general textual vs. micro blog-specific ones) to identify credible posts from which subsequent query expansion terms are extracted. - Gabriel Dulac-Arnold et al. – Text Classification: A Sequential Reading Approach
The authors present a sequential reading problem of text classification. They propose using a probabilistic model to determine at which point the classification does not improve significantly by reading further lines of the document. - Jinyoung Kim et al. – An Analysis of Time-Instability in Web Search Results
A nice survey of the frequency at which top-ranked result lists change for major search engines. - Wolfgang Gatterbauer – Rules of Thumb for Information Acquisition from Large and Redundant Data
An overview of clever sampling heuristics to approximate exhaustive reads of textual collections. - Elena Smirnova et al. – A User-Oriented Model for Expert Finding (Best Paper)
The authors introduce novel considerations into expert finding based on the searcher. An expert’s proximity to the searcher (with respect to a social network, organizational chart of an institution or a building’s office layout) as well as the relative expertise given the searcher are discussed.
PuppyIR presented their query assistance demonstrator for children. The open source code base of the demo can be obtained from Sourceforge.
