intelligent information access
My thesis hit a significant milestone last week as it crossed the 500 download mark. It took less than 8 months since it was made available online in 2008 July to reach this.
The first release of the implementation of the models introduced in the thesis, alias EARS (Entity and Association Retrieval System), is expected to arrive before the end of this month.
This was the title of the workshop I organized at SIGIR 2008 in July. The main objective of the workshop was to bring people from different research communities together, to discuss recent advances in expertise retrieval, and to define a research roadmap for the next years.
I think (and I hope I’m not alone with this) that the workshop was a success, with many interesting papers and lively discussions. If you’re interested in expert finding but missed it, now is your chance to find out what themes were discussed; check out the workshop summary that was recently published in the December 2008 issue of SIGIR Forum.
Our first paper on formal models for expertise retrieval, Formal Models for Expert Finding in Enterprise Corpora by Krisztian Balog, Leif Azzopardi, and Maarten de Rijke from SIGIR’06, has been very influential. It has received 70 citations according to Google Scholar so far, and the models we laid down there (especially “Model 2”) have become the de facto baselines against which other approaches compare themselves.
A Language Modeling Framework for Expert Finding, from the same authors, will be published in the January 2009 issue of Information Processing & Management. Actually, it is available online since September 2008, but I have not posted about it yet – so it’s time to make up for it!
The IPM paper can be seen as an extension of the SIGIR’06 work. Additions include the proximity-based versions of candidate and document models (Models 1B and 2B), a solution for setting the smoothing parameter for each model by automatic means, advanced document-candidate associations, and an extensive empirical comparison of the different methods, followed by a detailed analysis of the results.
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My PhD thesis titled People Search in the Enterprise is made available online. Contact me if you want a paperback version! |
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Part of the contributions of the thesis is a collection of resources, including software code, as well as data. These will come in several releases, starting very soon… |
Finding Key Bloggers, One Post At A Time by Wouter Weerkamp, Krisztian Balog and Maarten de Rijke is available online now. Our idea of applying expertise retrieval models to the task of blog distillation was first described in a SIGIR 2008 poster titled Bloggers as Experts. The conclusions of that work was that the expert finding Model 1 can compete with state-of-the-art on the blog distillation task. In the ECAI paper we explore additional blog-specific features (including representation, number of comments, post length, and temporal ordering) and, in addition, a combination of these. We find that these result in significant improvements over the baseline.