After recovery from chairing ISWC 2009, I had always intended to blog about some of the changes my co-chair Avi Bernstien and I tried for the conference. I was prompted to do it today by a very interesting post by James Landay—it describes problems with the current CHI/UIST reviewing process, and led to some fascinating [...]
Having gotten ISWC’s Ontology Panel off my chest, I want to take the time to discuss the Best Paper Awards we gave at the conference. The papers that got these awards received uniformly high ratings from their reviewers, were recommended for awards by the program committee, impressed the program chairs, and had good presentations at [...]
Ever since returning from the 2009 International Semantic Web Conference last week I’ve been bursting to discuss a panel that took place there on the topic “Does the Semantic Web need Ontologies?”. But the WWW2010 deadline was today and we had 3 papers to write. With that deadline now 10 minutes past, I can [...]
Peter Bailey et al. from Microsoft described a study comparing sources of context in predicting the subsequent interests of a user looking at a particular page. (A note of caution, the term context in the IR community refers to auxillary text or documents used to augment a query typically to help disambiguate it and improve [...]
From our friends in Southhampton (correction: and Hasso-Platner), a study of how to differentiate experts (who really know how to tag stuff) from spammers (who want to tag their own stuff, but try to acquire credibility by copying tags others have used). They try to exploit the difference that the people who tag first are [...]
Xavier Amatriain of Telefonica research presented work on collaborative filtering. Usually you do collaborative filtering by finding the other users “similar” to your subject and combining their recommendations. This paper argued/demonstrated that sometimes you are better off figuring out who the experts art and only paying attention to their opinions. You might just create [...]
Robert Villa of U. Glasgow presented. They consider how broad complex tasks can be supported through a search interface, covering the multiple subtasks someone might need to perform—e.g., investigating several candidate resources in the middle of the search, or, doing multiple related searches. They developed an interface that let users create and [...]
Diane Kelley of UNC Chapel Hill presented some interfaces for helping users refine their queries. Lots of situations arise where people need to enter a series of queries to home in on what they are looking for. Literature shows people can exhaust their ideas for good search queries. IR has explored techniques [...]
I saw a nice poster from U. Glasgow which shows that different search engines exhibit different biases on which news media providers are returned as results for various queries. E.g., one search engine avoids New York Times, another avoids Reuters. They can’t tell whether these biases are intentional or side effects of ranking [...]
David Carmel from IBM Haifa spoke about the problem of labelling document clusters. The goal is to find short labels for the clusters that describe them well to end users. The typical approach seeks important terms in the clusters. But sometimes important terms aren’t helpful/meaningful, and sometimes the best labels don’t show up in the [...]