The UvA ISLA team (consisting of me, Marc Bron, Maarten de Rijke, and Wouter Weerkamp) achieved top performance at the Entity Ranking (XER) track at INEX 2009, on both tasks (entity ranking and list completion). Our submission employed a slightly tweaked variation of the best performing models we describe in our paper entitled Category-based Query Modeling for Entity Search; this work will be presented at ECIR at the end of this month (the paper is available online).
Although we did really great at INEX, our achievement is somewhat weakened by the fact that only 5 teams participated at the XER track (including us). The number of participating teams was 8 in 2007, 6 in 2008, and 5 in 2009. So, what’s the future of INEX-XER (or INEX for that matter)?
Update Apr 19, 2010: the paper describing our approach @INEX is available online.