The list of papers accepted for the Future Challenges in Expertise Retrieval (fCHER) workshop at SIGIR 2008 can be found here.
ECAI 2008 paper online
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.
Thesis approved
I am happy to announce that my PhD thesis titled People Search in the Enterprise has been approved by the committee. The public PhD defense will take place on the 30th of September, 2008.
It is planned that the final version of thesis will be made available online early July, 2008.
fCHER submission deadline extended
The submission deadline for the Future Challenges in Expertise Retrieval (fCHER) SIGIR 2008 workshop has been extended to May 23, 2008 (23:59 GMT).
Expertise Retrieval Workshop at SIGIR 2008
I’m co-organizing a workshop at SIGIR 2008 (together with Yong Yu) titled Future Challenges in Expertise Retrieval (fCHER). Since the introduction of the Expert Finding task at TREC 2005, a rapid progress has been made in terms of modeling, algorithms, and evaluation over the past 3 years. In fact, expertise retrieval has reached the point where it is appropriate to assess progress, bring people from different research communities together, and define a research agenda for the next years. This workshop aims to determine what we have accomplished and where we need to go from here in expertise retrieval.