James' weekly student meeting, Fall 2006

This page covers information related to the weekly meeting of James' students.

This page is now out of date. See James' students, Spring 2007 for the semester after this one.

This semester, we normally meet Tuesdays in cs303, 2:30-3:30, with the room reserved until 3:45 for added discussion.

September

• 5th. Housekeeping, planning, and then...
  • Fernando will present Tao et al, "Language Model Information Retrieval with Document Expansion", HLT 2006. pdf
• 12th.
  • Ron will present Bekkerman et al, "Combinatorial Markov Random Fields", ECML 2006. pdf
  • Mark will present Jones et al (Yahoo), "Generating Query Substitutions", WWW 2006. Rather than expanding queries, just replace them with a different query. pdf
• 19th. Note unusual time This meeting will be from 4:00-5:00, same room.
  • Giri will present Chakrabarti (IIT), "Optimizing Scoring Functions and Indexes for Proximity Search in Typeannotated Corpora", WWW 2006. Idea is to find, say, people near restrictor terms; probably useful for QA-like tasks. pdf
  • Ao will present Yih et al (MSR), "Finding Advertising Keywords on Web Pages", WWW 2006. A variation on finding key terms in a document? pdf
• 26th.
  • Xing will present Richardson et al (MS), "Beyond PageRank: Machine Learning for Static Ranking", WWW 2006. pdf
  • Niranjan will present Sahami and Heilman (Google), "A Web-based Kernel Function for Measuring the Similarity of Short Text Snippets", WWW 2006. pdf

October

• 3rd.
  • Ben will present Yang and Jen (Google), "Retroactive Answering of Search Queries", WWW 2006. Predict what the user is interested in based on past queries, and feed newly-found material on that topic. pdf
  • Hema will present Kraft et al (Yahoo), "Searching with Context", WWW 2006. pdf
• 10th. James out of town at GALE PI meeting.
• 17th.
  • James will present Bar-Yossef and Gurevich, "Random Sampling from a Search Engine's Index", WWW 2006, best paper award winner. pdf
• 24th.
  • Ron will present Huang and Mitchell (CMU), "Text Clustering with Extended User Feedback", SIGIR 2006. pdf
  • Ao will present Sun et al (MSR Asia), "CWS: A Comparative Web Search System", WWW 2006. Compare a set of topics. pdf
• 31st.
  • Fernando will present a tutorial on using the local score regularization (LSR) code.
  • Mark will present Cormack and Lynam (Waterloo), "Statistical precision of information retrieval evaluation", SIGIR 2006. acm citation available from on campus

November

• 7th.
  • Mark will present his SIGIR idea or some other idea needing feedback.
  • Giri will present Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Liliana Calderon-Benavides, Cristina Gonzalez-Caro (Yahoo! Research), "The Intention Behind Web Queries" , SPIRE 2006. No link yet.
• 14th. TREC is this week, so James (at least) may be gone this day.
• 21st.
  • Ben will present his SIGIR idea.
  • Fernando will present his SIGIR idea.
• 28th. *

December

• 5th.
  • Hema will present her SIGIR idea.
  • Giri will present his SIGIR idea.
• 12th.
  • Xing will present his SIGIR idea.
• 19th. Classes are over, but we may still meet. Hold the date.
  • Niranjan will present his SIGIR idea.
  • Ao will present his SIGIR idea.
• 26th. No meeting.

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Suggested papers

If you have a paper that you think ought to be considered for presentation, please list it below. At a minimum, please provide a link to the text of the paper (or a page that contains such a link), the venue where it appeared, the date it appeared (or will appear), and your name (so James can ask you questions if needed). Other information (title, author, etc) is great, but not critical. James gets to decide which papers are actually selected, and may opt not to include any of the ones below. If you like a paper that's listed, please feel free to add your vote of interest: "great idea (ja)".

• Qiu and Cho (UCLA), "Automatic Identification of User Interest For Personalized Search", WWW 2006. Claims that user preferences can be learned in a few clicks. pdf
• David Carmel, Elad Yom-Tov, Adam Darlow, and Dan Pelleg, “What makes a query difficult?”, SIGIR06, pdf (suggested by F)
• George Forman, “Tackling Concept Drift by Temporal Inductive Transfer ”, SIGIR06, pdf (suggested by F)
• Jun and Ahamad (GIT), "FeedEx: Collaborative Exchange of News Feeds", WWW 2006. A variation on collaborative filtering. pdf

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