http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kbalog Beyond document search. Finding entities... Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:58:47 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The Entity track overview paper has been added to the TREC 2009 online Proceedings [direct link to the pdf]. The track continues in 2010. An overview of what happened at the 2009 TREC conference (entity wise), along with plans for the 2010 edition has been published on the track's ... http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kbalog/2010-03-09/trec-entity-overview-of-2009-and-plans-for-2010/ 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 ... http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kbalog/2010-03-01/best-inex2009-entity-ranking/ The CLEF 2010 labs will feature two evaluation campaigns that are potentially of interest to people working in the area of entity/people/expert search. The third WePS Evaluation Workshop (WePS3) focuses on two tasks related to web entity search:Task 1: Clustering and Attribute Extraction for Web People Search.Given a set of web search ... http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kbalog/2010-02-12/two-evaluation-campaigns-related-to-entityexpert-search/ This picture gives you a bit of an idea how my week in the run-up for SIGIR deadline looked like (I also have a nice collection of energy drink cans at the office). But, that is finally over, and I managed to get in my submissions on time. That means ... http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kbalog/2010-01-23/work-hard-relax-hard/ This year has started quite intensely, with a research grant proposal deadline already on week 1. But, I'd like to take a moment and look back on 2009, before rushing on to the next deadline (which is SIGIR 2010, in less than a week away). First, I'd like to make an ... http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kbalog/2010-01-17/looking-back-on-2009-and-forward-to-2010/ I haven't had time to post entries on my blog over the past few weeks (or even months -- has it really been that long ago?). Anyway, here is a couple of things worth mentioning before 2009 is officially over. A newer version of the EARS toolkit has been released. Major ... http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kbalog/2009-12-31/last-bundle-of-updates-for-2009/ The overview paper of the TREC 2008 Enterprise track is -finally- available. While I was not an organizer of the track, I helped out with finishing the paper; the track organizers generously awarded my contribution with a first authorship. The document still needs to undergo the NIST approval ... http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kbalog/2009-10-23/trec-enterprise-2008-overview/ On the 9th of October 2009, I received the Victorine van Schaickprijs 2009 award for my PhD dissertation entitled "People Search in the Enterprise". This award is given out yearly by the Victorine van Schaick Funds to one selected publication (journal article, book, or report) in the area of ... http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kbalog/2009-10-11/awarded-with-victorine-van-schaickprijs-2009/ After a period of development I am ready to release EARS to the world. EARS is an open source toolkit for entity-oriented search and discovery in large text collections. The association finding framework and models implemented in EARS were originally developed for expertise retrieval in an organizational setting, during my ... http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kbalog/2009-09-14/ears-released/ The main development that I am pleased to report is the release of the final test topics. The test set comprises 20 topics, which is less than we originally aimed for, but this is what could be achieved within the time limits. We certainly wanted to avoid extending the deadlines ... http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kbalog/2009-08-01/update-on-the-trec-entity-track/