A quick update on the TREC Entity track, which reminds me of the classical good news-bad news situation. The good news is that we have just reached 100 members on the TREC entity mailing list. The bad news is that almost all of them are mute.
On a more serious account, the track guidelines need to get finalized very soon. One way of interpreting the silence is that people are happy with the proposed task and all details are clear. There may be other (less positive) interpretations. Whichever the case might be, in the absence of discussion, organizers will simply dictate what is to be done.
Month: June 2009
Seminar on Searching and Ranking in Enterprises
Today, on the occasion of the PhD defense of Pavel Serdyukov, a seminar on enterprise seach was held at the University of Twente. Three of Pavel’s committee members gave talks: David Hawking, Iadh Ounis, and Maarten de Rijke.
The summaries of the talks will soon be uploaded.
Of course, the main attraction of the day was Pavel’s defense. His PhD thesis is entitled The search for expertise: Beyond direct evidence. He was confronted with interesting, and, sometimes quite challenging questions, but handled them to the satisfaction of the committee. Congratulations Pavel, I mean, Dr. Serdyukov!
Back on TREC
Yes, things have been quiet lately on the TREC Entity homepage. Now that training topics have been made available, I sincerely hope that this is about to change. We are in the process of developing test topics and finalizing the guidelines, so make sure your voice is heard if you want something different…