Entity Linking and Retrieval tutorial at WWW’13
Earlier this week, Edgar Meij, Daan Odijk, and I gave a half-day tutorial at the WWW’13 conference on Entity Linking and Retrieval.
The tutorial consists of three parts: (i) entity linking (Edgar), (ii) entity retrieval (me), and a hands-on lab session (Daan). The hands-on session is further subdivided into entity linking and entity retrieval parts. The slides are made available on github. We also created a Mendeley group with all the papers that were discussed. The tags, entity linking and entity retrieval, hint the part of the tutorial to which each paper belongs. We intend to maintain and expand this repository, so it might be useful for you to follow this group.
Given that this was a half-day tutorial, we had to be quite selective in what we presented. A full-day version of the same tutorial will be given by us at SIGIR’13 in July. If you have suggestions for improvements and pointers to papers, approaches, services, etc. that we could/should cover (yes, this includes your own work) then don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!
First picks from 2013
It’s almost mid Feb, so I won’t even attempt to make it a Happy New Year entry. And I’ll keep it short.
As of Jan 1 this year, I’m working as an Associate Professor at the University of Stavanger. Don’t look for the IR group’s homepage, there is no such thing. Yet 
Briefly about (some of) my recent work. Not surprisingly, it’s all related to entities. In a SPIRE’12 paper we study ad-hoc entity retrieval in Linked Data in a distributed setting, with focus on the problems of collection ranking and collection selection. In a short position paper, written for the ESAIR’12 workshop, we discuss how to make entity retrieval temporally-aware, using semantic knowledge bases that are enriched with temporal information (like YAGO2). In a CIKM’12 poster we introduce the task of target type identification for entity-oriented queries, where types are organized hierarchically. We also made all related resources publicly available.
Most recently, just earlier this week, I gave a lecture on Semistructured Data Search at the PROMISE Winter School. At some point in the not-too-distant future there might be a written version of this material. So if you have any feedback, comments, suggestions, etc. please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Finally, I decided to set up and maintain a separate page with a list of entity-oriented benchmarking campaigns, workshops, and journal special issues. I hope people will find it useful. If you have a relevant piece to be added here, let me know.
Survey on Expertise Retrieval
Together with Yi Fang (Purdue University, USA), Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Pavel Serdyukov (Yandex, Russia), and Luo Si (Purdue University, USA), I wrote a survey paper on Expertise Retrieval for the Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval (FnTIR) journal, which is now available online. (If your organization doesn’t have a subscription, you can get a free copy from my homepage.)
The study offers a comprehensive overview of expertise retrieval, primarily from an IR perspective, but many other aspects of this multi-faceted research area are also covered. Our main attention is on models and algorithms, which are organized in five groups of basic approaches. We discuss extensions of these models as well as practical considerations. At the end of the survey, we identify a number of possible future directions; these could be of particular interest to those currently working in this area.
Future research directions in IR
Wondering what your next IR conference paper should be about? This is the billion dollar question (well, at least for IR researchers) that I surely won’t answer for you. But, here is some hint.
(I’ve just come across this on Facebook (thnx to Arjen P. De Vries and Claudia Hauff); this is evidence, that if you cut through all the clutter, FB can indeed be a great tool sometimes for finding serendipitous information. Maybe this is also something to think about…)
The list contains nominated papers from prominent IR researchers “that, in their opinion, represent important new directions, research areas, or results in the IR field.”
I must say I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. And yes, it does make me feel good that I see our last year’s ECIR paper with Elena Smirnova on the list 