Bilkent University
Department of Computer Engineering

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S E M I N A R

 

Mining Tag Data for the Evaluation of Personalised Information Retrieval

 

Fabio Crestani
Faculty of Informatics
University of Lugano,Switzerland

The talk will present some work on the mining and use of tag data for evaluating personalised retrieval systems involving thousands of users. Mining data from the social bookmarking site Del.icio.us, we demonstrate how one can rate the quality of personalized retrieval results. Furthermore, we conduct experiments involving various smoothing techniques and profile settings, which show that a user's bookmark history can be used to improve search results via personalization. Analogously to studies involving implicit feedback mechanisms in IR, which have found that profiles based on the content of clicked URLs outperform those based on past queries alone, we find that profiles based on the content of bookmarked URLs are generally superior to those based on tags alone.

Bio: Fabio Crestani is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Informatics of the University of Lugano in Switzerland since 2007. Before that he was Professor of Computer Sciences of the University of Strathclyde (UK) in 2000-06 and Assistant Professor at the University of Padova (Italy) in 1992-97. In between he held research fellowships at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK), the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley (USA), and the University of Glasgow (UK). He is an internationally recognised researcher in Information Retrieval, Text Mining and Digital Libraries having published over one hundred refereed publications on both theoretical and experimental aspects. Finally, since 2008 he is the editor-in-chief of the journal Information Processing and Management, published by Elsevier.

 

DATE: 2 June, 2009, Tuesday@ 10:40
PLACE: EA 409