blog

A Late “Happy New Year!”

Never too late for a happy new year…
I was pretending to be on vacation (while, in fact, working on some interesting proposal), but now I’m officially back in business.

I wanted my first 2009 post to be on “looking back on 2008”, but I had to face reality and realize that writing that summary might be too hard and definitely too time-consuming.

Nevertheless, I still wanted to summarize my scientific outcome somehow, and then I came across a great website, called QuadSearch. It ranks your publications based on citation counts, calculates statistics and research impact indexes, such as the H-index and G-index. The coverage is not perfect, but is pretty decent, as far as I can tell.

And the numbers are…

H-INDEX (Hirsch Number): 8
Egghe’s G-INDEX: 13
Maximum Cites: 74
Total Cites: 214, Total Articles: 34
Cites/Paper: 6.2941

 

The top 5 papers from this chart are:

  1. Formal models for expert finding in enterprise corpora; SIGIR 2006 (Cited by 74)
  2. Finding experts and their details in e-mail corpora; WWW 2006 (Cited by 27)
  3. Language Modeling Approaches for Enterprise Tasks; TREC 2005 (Cited by 16)
  4. Why are they excited? identifying and explaining spikes in blog mood level; EACL 2006 (Cited by 13)
  5. Broad expertise retrieval in sparse data environments; SIGIR 2007 (Cited by 13)

Let’s see how much these numbers improve in 2009 :)

Happy new year & welcome back

I took a little break from work so I could celebrate Christmas, spend time with the family, etc. I am back online now, and ready to commit myself to full-time thesis writing for the upcoming several weeks.

As to expert search material, here is a quick update.

  • Our (me and Maarten de Rijke) recent paper titled Associating People and Documents has been accepted to ECIR 2008. Common to most expertise search approaches is a component that estimates the strength of the association between a document and a people. In this paper we perform a careful analysis and investigation of how different association methods contribute to performance. The camera-ready version of the paper will be available from the Publications page, after jan 11).
  • We (me, Maarten, and Leif Azzopardi) submitted a paper titled A Language Modeling Framework for Expertise Search to the Information Processing and Management (IPM) journal. In this paper we introduce our language modeling approaches to expertise search in detail, and integrate these into a generative probabilistic framework. Since it is not a conference paper, it may take some time until it can be published.

There is some reading material from CIKM 2007:

Looks like the topic of expertise retrieval is gaining more and more popularity in IR conferences. While browsing the list of accepted papers for ECIR 2008, I found 3 full papers (out of 33) and 1 short paper (out of 19) about expert search, which gives the topic a solid presence.

  • (Serdyukov and Hiemstra)
    Modeling documents as mixtures of persons for expert finding [full]
  • (Balog and de Rijke)
    Associating People and Documents [full]
  • (Macdonald et al.)
    High Quality Expertise Evidence for Expert Search [full]
  • (Macdonald and Ounis)
    Expert Search Evaluation by Supporting Documents [short]

Upgraded to blog

Welcome to my new academic homepage that has just been transformed to a blog (the old version is still available here well, not anymore). My goal with this site is to bring together those people who find this emerging area of entity retrieval in general, and expertise search in particular interesting. I’ll use this blog to report on research activities, publications, conferences, ideas, etc., and invite you to share your comments, opinions, links to interesting resources, etc.
I make no promises about how frequently this page will be updated. Needless to say, any feedback (comments, email) would certainly keep me motivated… Stay tuned!