Our two ECIR 2010 papers are online now. One is entitled Category-based Query Modeling for Entity Search and authored by Krisztian Balog, Marc Bron and Maarten de Rijke. Users often search for entities instead of documents and in this setting are willing to provide extra input, in addition to a query, such as category information and example entities. We propose a general probabilistic framework for entity search to evaluate and provide insight in the many ways of using these types of input for query modeling. We focus on the use of category information and show the advantage of a category-based representation over a term-based representation, and also demonstrate the effectiveness of category-based expansion using example entities. Our best performing model shows very competitive performance on the INEX-XER entity ranking and list completion tasks. The paper is available here.

Our other ECIR 2010 paper is called News Comments: Exploring, Modeling, and Online Prediction with Manos Tsagkias, Wouter Weerkamp and Maarten de Rijke as authors. Online news agents provide commenting facilities for their readers to express their opinions or sentiments with regards to news stories. The number of user supplied comments on a news article may be indicative of its importance, interestingness, or impact. We explore the news comments space, and compare the log-normal and the negative binomial distributions for modeling comments from various news agents. These estimated models can be used to normalize raw comment counts and enable comparison across different news sites. We also examine the feasibility of online prediction of the number of comments, based on the volume observed shortly after publication. We report on solid performance for predicting news comment volume in the long run, after short observation. This prediction can be useful for identifying news stories with the potential to ``take off,'' and can be used to support front page optimization for news sites. The paper is available here.

Listening to ''BWV 0730 Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier'', by Hans Fagius (Organ) (Play Count: 3)