The Noisy Channel

If you’re a search engine junkie like me, you’ve probably heard about Blekko, a search engine that has been percolating for over two years and recently launched a private beta. If not, I encourage you to watch the TechCrunch video I’ve embedded above. You can join the beta by following them on Twitter. I did [...]

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The 4th Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval (HCIR 2010) is coming up on August 22 in New Brunswick, NJ, taking place immediately after the Information Interaction in Context conference (IIiX 2010). That’s just a few weeks away! If you are are interested in attending and haven’t already registered, please let me know as [...]

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As I blogged a few months ago, University of Oviedo professor Daniel Gayo-Avello published a research paper entitled “Nepotistic Relationships in Twitter and their Impact on Rank Prestige Algorithms“, in which he concluded that TunkRank was the best of the measures he studied for ranking Twitter users. I recently discovered that he and David Brenes posted slides from [...]

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Yahoo! Answers and Answers.com have been around since 2005. But community question answering (as distinct from question answering using natural language processing) has witnessed a resurgence of popularity–at least in the blogosphere and among investors. Quora and Hunch are two of hottest startups on the web, and Aardvark was acquired by Google earlier this year. Most recently, Ask.com [...]

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The second day of the SIGIR 2010 conference kicked off with a keynote by TREC pioneer Donna Harman entitled “Is the Cranfield Paradigm Outdated?”. If you are at all familiar with Donna’s work on TREC, you’ll hardly be surprised that her answer was a resounding “NO!”. But of course she did a lot more than [...]

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The first day of SIGIR 2010 ended with a monster poster session–over 100 posters to see in 2 hours in a hall without air conditioning! I managed to see a handful: “Query Quality: User Ratings and System Predictions” by Claudia Hauff, Franciska de Jong, Diane Kelly, and Leif Azzopardi offered the startling (to me at [...]

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I’ve always felt that parallel conference sessions are designed to optimize for anticipated regret, and SIGIR 2010 is no exception. I decided that I’d try to attend whole sessions rather than shuttle between them. I started by attending the descriptively titled “Applications I” session. Jinyoung Kim of UMass presented joint work with Bruce Croft on [...]

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As promised, here are some highlights of the SIGIR 2010 conference thus far. Also check out the tweet stream with hash tag #sigir2010. I arrived here on Monday, too jet-lagged to even imagine attending the tutorials, but fortunately I recovered enough to go to the welcome reception in the Parc de Bastions that evening. Then [...]

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I gave this presentation today at AT&T Labs, hosted by Stephen North of Graphviz fame. The talk was recorded, but I don’t know when the video will be available. In the mean time, here are the slides. The audience was very engaged and questioned just about all of the TunkRank model’s assumptions. I’m hopeful that as [...]

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Eric Andersen called my attention to a post by Nick Carr entitled “Experiments in delinkification“, in which Carr argues that links embedded in text are distracting, and that we’re better off treating them like the footnotes they evolved from and putting them in a block at the end of the text. It’s an interesting piece, [...]

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