Feature Article – Page 6

SocialSensor: Sensing political content in social media streams

The successful use of online material in political campaigns over the past two decades has motived the inclusion of social network websites—such as Twitter—as an integral part of the political apparatus. Indeed, after the growth of candidate websites in 1996, Jesse Ventura’s e-mail campaign in 1998, the online fund-raising for John McCain’s campaign in 2000,… Continue reading SocialSensor: Sensing political content in social media streams

Detecting adverse-drug effects in natural language using limited training data

A large amount of information is provided in text documents but difficult to access for computer programs. In order to detect complex information it is often important to understand the relationships between words and entities in sentences. A relation can express for instance that a disease has a particular finding or a that a drug… Continue reading Detecting adverse-drug effects in natural language using limited training data

Search strategies considered harmful

Over the last few months I’ve been looking in detail at the process of search strategy formulation, i.e. the various ways in which professionals go about solving the problem of resolving complex information needs. Some professions (e.g. recruitment professionals) employ complex search queries to address sourcing needs, generating queries such as this:

Dynamic Group Formation for Search Personalisation

In recent years, Search Personalisation has been attracting more and more attention in both academia and industry. Different from classical search methods in which the personalisation is not taken into account, personalised search engines utilise personal data of each user to tailor search results to the specific user, which depend not only on the input… Continue reading Dynamic Group Formation for Search Personalisation

Benchmarking News Recommendations: The CLEF NewsREEL Use Case

Many online news portals display at the bottom of their articles a small widget box labelled, “You might also be interested in”, “Recommended articles”, or similarly where users can find a list of recommended news articles. An example is shown in Figure 1.

Dynamic Information Retrieval Modeling

Change is at the heart of a modern Information Retrieval system. Advances in IR interface, personalization and ad display demand models that can intelligently react to users and their context in real time. Many of the current problems in IR research can be attributed to dynamic systems, for instance, in session search or recommender systems. The… Continue reading Dynamic Information Retrieval Modeling

Understanding professional use of complex search strategies

Do you find yourself at work staring at a jumble of text like this: ((((curtiss) NOT (curtis))) OR (((curtiss-* OR ~Curtiss-Wright* OR curtiss NEAR/1 wright*) AND ((model* OR monoplane*) NOT (prototype*))))) If you are, we suspect you’re writing a complex query as part of a sophisticated search strategy and we would like to find out… Continue reading Understanding professional use of complex search strategies

Mining search logs for usage patterns (pt 2)

In a previous post I discussed some initial investigations into the use of unsupervised learning techniques (i.e. clustering) to identify usage patterns in web search logs. As you may recall, we had some initial success in finding interesting patterns of user behaviour in the AOL log, but when we tried to extend this and replicate… Continue reading Mining search logs for usage patterns (pt 2)

Mining search logs for usage patterns (Part 1)

As I mentioned in a previous post I’ve recently been looking into the challenges of search log analysis and in particular the prospects for deriving a ‘taxonomy of search sessions’. The idea is that if we can find distinct, repeatable patterns of behaviour in search logs then we can use these to better understand user… Continue reading Mining search logs for usage patterns (Part 1)