SIGIR 2012 papers online
July 16, 2012 07:33 Filed in: Papers
Two
SIGIR 2012 papers are online now.
In “A subjunctive exploratory search interface to support media studies researchers” (Marc Bron, Jasmijn van Gorp, Frank Nack, Maarten de Rijke, Andrei Vishneuski and Sonja de Leeuw) we focus on media studies, which concerns the production, interpretation and reception of various types of media. Today's continuous production and storage of media is changing the way these researchers work and requires the development of new search models and tools. We investigate the research cycle of media studies researchers and find that it is an iterative process consisting of several search processes in which data is gathered and the research question is refined. Changes in the research question, however, trigger new data gathering processes. Based on these outcomes we propose a subjunctive exploratory search interface to support media studies researchers in refining their research question in an earlier stage of their research. To assess the subjunctive interface we conduct a user study and compare to a traditional exploratory search interface. We find that with the subjunctive interface users explore more diverse topics than with the standard interface and that users formulate more specific research questions. Although the subjunctive interface is more complex this does not decrease its usability. These findings suggest that the subjunctive interface supports media studies researchers. The advantage of a subjunctive interface for exploration suggests a new direction for the development of exploratory search systems. PDF
In “Identifying entity aspects in microblog posts” (Damiano Spina, Edgar Meij, Maarten de Rijke, Andrei Oghina, Buih M. Thuong, Mathias Breuss) we focus on online reputation management, which is about monitoring and handling the public image of entities (such as companies) on the Web. An important task in this area is identifying aspects of the entity of interest (such as products, services, competitors, key people, etc.) given a stream of microblog posts referring to the entity. In this paper we compare different IR techniques and opinion target identification methods for automatically identifying aspects and find that (i) simple statistical methods such as TF.IDF are a strong baseline for the task, significantly outperforming opinion-oriented methods, and (ii) only considering terms tagged as nouns improves the results for all the methods analyzed. PDF
In “A subjunctive exploratory search interface to support media studies researchers” (Marc Bron, Jasmijn van Gorp, Frank Nack, Maarten de Rijke, Andrei Vishneuski and Sonja de Leeuw) we focus on media studies, which concerns the production, interpretation and reception of various types of media. Today's continuous production and storage of media is changing the way these researchers work and requires the development of new search models and tools. We investigate the research cycle of media studies researchers and find that it is an iterative process consisting of several search processes in which data is gathered and the research question is refined. Changes in the research question, however, trigger new data gathering processes. Based on these outcomes we propose a subjunctive exploratory search interface to support media studies researchers in refining their research question in an earlier stage of their research. To assess the subjunctive interface we conduct a user study and compare to a traditional exploratory search interface. We find that with the subjunctive interface users explore more diverse topics than with the standard interface and that users formulate more specific research questions. Although the subjunctive interface is more complex this does not decrease its usability. These findings suggest that the subjunctive interface supports media studies researchers. The advantage of a subjunctive interface for exploration suggests a new direction for the development of exploratory search systems. PDF
In “Identifying entity aspects in microblog posts” (Damiano Spina, Edgar Meij, Maarten de Rijke, Andrei Oghina, Buih M. Thuong, Mathias Breuss) we focus on online reputation management, which is about monitoring and handling the public image of entities (such as companies) on the Web. An important task in this area is identifying aspects of the entity of interest (such as products, services, competitors, key people, etc.) given a stream of microblog posts referring to the entity. In this paper we compare different IR techniques and opinion target identification methods for automatically identifying aspects and find that (i) simple statistical methods such as TF.IDF are a strong baseline for the task, significantly outperforming opinion-oriented methods, and (ii) only considering terms tagged as nouns improves the results for all the methods analyzed. PDF