Conference Programme


Of the 220 paper submissions, 42 have been accepted as papers (19%) and 19 as short papers.

Of the 72 poster submissions, 21 have been accepted.

Registration:

2 April, from 8.00 to 16.00

3-4 April, from 8.30 to 12.30



                          2 April 3 April 4 April 5 April
  9.15-9.30 Opening
  9.30-10.30 Keynote: Andrei Broder Design and Efficiency Keynote: Stephen Robertson Keynote: Marco Gori
10.30-10.50
Coffee break
10.50-12.30 Theory and Design Peer-to-Peer Networks
(In memory of Henrik Nottelmann)
Filtering Multimedia IR and Evaluation
12.30-14.00
Lunch
14.00-15.40 Efficiency Topic Identification and Expert Finding Result Merging and Relevance Feedback XML and Web IR
15.40-16.00
Coffee break
16.00-17.40 Queries Poster Session Short Paper Session Classification and Clustering
17.40-18.10 Closing
19.30-22.00 Google reception at Grand Hotel Plaza Banquet at Casina Valadier




2 April


Opening

2 April 9.15-9.30

Introduction
Gianni Amati, Claudio Carpineto, Gianni Romano, the ECIR 2007 Conference Chairs.

Welcome speech
Guido Salerno Aletta (Managing Director of Fondazione Ugo Bordoni)

Keynote: Andrei Broder

2 April 9.30-10.30

Chair: Gianni Amati

The Next Generation Web Search and the Demise of the Classic IR model
Andrei Broder (Fellow & VP Emerging Search Yahoo! Research)

Theory and Design

2 April 10.50-12.30

Chair: Norbert Fuhr

Similarity Measures for Short Segments of Text
Donald Metzler (University of Massachusetts)
Susan Dumais (Microsoft Research)
Chris Meek (Microsoft Research)

Multinomial Randomness Models for Retrieval with Document Fields
Vassilis Plachouras (Yahoo! Research)
Iadh Ounis (University of Glasgow)

On score distributions and relevance
Stephen Robertson (Microsoft Research Cambridge)

Modeling Term Associations for Ad-hoc Retrieval Performance within Language Modeling Framework
Xing Wei (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
W. Bruce Croft (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Efficiency

2 April 14.00-15.40

Chair: Charles Clarke

Static Pruning of Terms in Inverted Files
Roi Blanco (University of A Coruña)
Alvaro Barreiro (University of A Coruña)

Efficient Indexing of Versioned Document Sequences
Ronny Lempel (IBM Haifa Research Lab)
Sivan Yogev (IBM Haifa Research Lab)
Michael Herscovici (Google Inc.)

Light Syntactically-based Index Pruning for Information Retrieval
Christina Lioma (University of Glasgow)
Iadh Ounis (University of Glasgow)

Efficient Construction of FM-index Using Overlapping Block Processing for Large Scale Texts
Di Zhang (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Yunquan Zhang (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Jing Chen (Microsoft Research Asia)

Queries

2 April 16.00-17.40

Chair: Barry Smyth

Query Hardness Estimation Using Jensen-Shannon Divergence Among Multiple Scoring Functions
Javed Aslam (Northeastern University)
Virgil Pavlu (Northeastern University)

Query Reformulation and Refinement Using NLP-Based Sentence Clustering
Frederic Roulland (Xerox Research Centre Europe)
Aaron Kaplan (Xerox Research Centre Europe)
Stefania Castellani (Xerox Research Centre Europe)
Claude Roux (Xerox Research Centre Europe)
Antonietta Grasso (Xerox Research Centre Europe)
Karin Pettersson (Xerox Research Centre Europe)
Jacki O'Neill (Xerox Research Centre Europe)

Automatic morphological query expansion using analogy-based machine learning
Fabienne MOREAU (IRISA)
Vincent CLAVEAU (IRISA)
Pascale Sebillot (IRISA)

Advanced Structural Representations for Question Classification and Answer Re-ranking
Silvia Quarteroni (The University of York)
Alessandro Moschitti (University of Rome "Tor Vergata")
Suresh Manandhar (The University of York)
Roberto Basili (University of Rome "Tor Vergata")


3 April


Design and Efficiency

3 April 9.30-10.30

Chair: Maristella Agosti

Sorting Out the Document Identifier Assignment Problem
Fabrizio Silvestri (ISTI - CNR)

A Parameterised Search System
Roberto Cornacchia (CWI)
Arjen P. de Vries (CWI)

Peer-to-Peer Networks (In memory of Henrik Nottelmann)

3 April 10.50-12.30

Chair: Mark Sanderson

Performance Comparison of Clustered and Replicated Information Retrieval Systems
Fidel Cacheda (University of A Corunã)
Victor Carneiro (University of A Corunã)
Vassilis Plachouras (Yahoo! Research)
Iadh Ounis (University of Glasgow)

A Study of a Weighting Scheme for Information Retrieval in Hierarchical Peer-to-Peer Networks
Massimo Melucci (University of Padua)
Alberto Poggiani (University of Padua)

A Decision-Theoretic Model for Decentralised Query Routing in Hierarchical Peer-To-Peer Networks
Henrik Nottelmann (University of Duisburg-Essen)
Norbert Fuhr (University of Duisburg-Essen)

Central-Rank-Based Collection Selection in Uncooperative Distributed Information Retrieval
Milad Shokouhi (RMIT University)

Topic Identification and Expert Finding

3 April 14.00-15.40

Chair: David Harper

Use of Topicality and Information Measures to Improve Document Representation for Story Link Detection
Chirag Shah (National Institute of Informatics (NII))
Koji Eguchi (National Institute of Informatics (NII))

Ad Hoc Retrieval of Documents with Topical Opinion
Jason Skomorowski (University of Waterloo)
Olga Vechtomova (University of Waterloo)

Probabilistic Models for Expert Finding
Hui Fang (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
ChengXiang Zhai (University of Illinoist at Urbana-Champaign)

Using Relevance Feedback in Expert Search
Craig Macdonald (University of Glasgow)
Iadh Ounis (University of Glasgow)

Poster Session

3 April 16.00-17.40

Cross-document entity tracking
Roxana Angheluta (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)
Marie-Francine Moens (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

Enterprise People and Skill Discovery Using Tolerant Retrieval and Visualization: A Case Study
Jan Brunnert (Hasso Plattner Institut)
Omar Alonso (SAP Research)
Dirk Riehle (SAP Research)

Experimental Results of the Signal Processing Approach to Distributional Clustering of Terms on Reuters-21578 collection
Marta Capdevila Dalmau (University of Vigo)
Oscar W. Marquez Florez (University of Vigo)

Overall Comparison at the Standard Levels of Recall of Multiple Retrieval Methods with the Friedman Test
Jose M. Casanova (University of Coruña)
Manuel A. Presedo Quindimil (University of Coruña)
Alvaro Barreiro (University of Coruña)

Building a Desktop Search Test-bed
Sergey Chernov (L3S Research Center)
Pavel Serdyukov (Twente Database Group)
Paul-Alexandru Chirita (L3S Research Center)
Gianluca Demartini (L3S Research Center)
Wolfgang Nejdl (L3S Research Center)

Hierarchical browsing of video key frames
Gianluigi Ciocca (Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca)
Raimondo Schettini (Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca)

Active Learning with History-Based Query Selection for Text Categorisation
Michael Davy (Trinity College Dublin)
Saturnino Luz (Trinity College Dublin)

Fighting Link Spam with a Two-Stage Ranking Strategy
Guanggang Geng (Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Chunheng Wang (Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Qiudan Li (Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Yuanping Zhu (Chinese Academy of Sciences)

Improving Naïve Bayes Text Classifier Using Smoothing Methods
Feng He (Tsinghua University)
Xiaoqing Ding (Tsinghua University)

Term Selection and Query Operations for Video Retrieval
Bouke Huurnink (University of Amsterdam)
Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam)

An Effective Threshold-based Neighbor Selection in Collaborative Filtering
Taek-Hun Kim (Yonsei University)
Sung-Bong Yang (Yonsei University)

Combining Multiple Sources of Evidence in XML Multimedia Documents: an Inference Network Incorporating Element Language Models
Zhigang Kong (Queen Mary, University of London)
Mounia Lalmas (Queen Mary, University of London)

Language Model Based Query Classification
Andreas Merkel (Saarland University)
Dietrich Klakow (Saarland University)

Integration of Text and Audio Features for Genre Classification in Music Information Retrieval
Robert Neumayer (Vienna University of Technology)
Andreas Rauber (Vienna University of Technology)

Retrieval Method for Same Video Content in Different Format based on Spatiotemporal Features
Xuefeng Pan (Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Jintao Li (Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Yongdong Zhang (Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Sheng Tang (Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Juan Cao (Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

Combination of Document Priors in Web Information Retrieval
Jie Peng (University of Glasgow)
Iadh Ounis (University of Glasgow)

Enhancing Expert Search through Query Modeling
Pavel Sedyukov (Twente Database Group)
Sergey Chernov (L3S Research Center)
Wolfgang Nejdl (L3S Research Center)

A Hierarchical Consensus Architecture for Robust Document Clustering
Xavier Sevillano (Enginyeria i Arquitectura La Salle. Ramon Llull University)
Germán Cobo (Enginyeria i Arquitectura La Salle. Ramon Llull University)
Francesc Alías (Enginyeria i Arquitectura La Salle. Ramon Llull University)
Joan Claudi Socoró (Enginyeria i Arquitectura La Salle. Ramon Llull University)

Summarisation and Novelty: An experimental investigation
Simon Sweeney (University of Strathclyde)
Fabio Crestani (University of Strathclyde)
David Losada (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela)

A Layered Approach to Context-Dependent User Modelling
Elena Vildjiounaite (Technical Research Centre of Finland)
Sanna Kallio (Technical Research Centre of Finland)

A Bayesian Approach for Learning Document Type Relevance
Peter C.K. Yeung (University of Waterloo)
Stefan Büttcher (University of Waterloo)
Charles L.A. Clarke (University of Waterloo)
Maheedhar Kolla (University of Waterloo)


4 April


Keynote: Stephen Robertson

4 April 9.30-10.30

Chair: Keith van Rijsbergen

The last half-century: a perspective on experimentation in information retrieval
Stephen Robertson (Microsoft Research Cambridge and City University London)

Filtering

4 April 10.50-12.30

Chair: Fabio Crestani

Personalized Communities in a Distributed Recommender System
Sylvain Castagnos (LORIA - University of Nancy 2)
Anne Boyer (LORIA - University of Nancy 2)

Information Recovery & Discovery in Collaborative web Search
Maurice Coyle (University College Dublin)
Barry Smyth (University College Dublin)

Collaborative Filtering based on Transitive Correlations between Items
Alexandros Nanopoulos (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)

Entropy-Based Authorship Search in Large Document Collections
Ying Zhao (RMIT University)
Justin Zobel (RMIT University)

Result Merging and Relevance Feedback

4 April 14.00-15.40

Chair: Mounia Lalmas

Results Merging Algorithm using multiple regression models
Georgios Paltoglou (Univerisity of Macedonia)
Michael Salampasis (Technological Education Institute of Thessaloniki)
Maria Satratzemi (University of Macedonia)

Segmentation of Search Engine Results for Effective Data-Fusion
Milad Shokouhi (RMIT University)

Incorporating Diversity and Density in Active Learning for Relevance Feedback
Zuobing Xu (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Ram Akella (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Yi Zhang (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Relevance Feedback using Weight Propagation Compared with Information-theoretic Query Expansion
Fadi Yamout (University of Sunderland)
Michael Oakes (University of Sunderland)
John Tait (University of Sunderland)

Short Paper Session

4 April 16.00-18.10

Chair: Iadh Ounis

Natural language processing for usage based indexing of web resources
Anne Boyer (INRIA Lorraine - Université Nancy2)
Armelle BRUN (INRIA Lorraine - Université Nancy2)

Harnessing Trust in Social Search
Peter Briggs (University College Dublin)
Barry Smyth (University College Dublin)

A Statistical and Graphical Methodology for Comparing Bilingual to Monolingual Cross-Language Information Retrieval
Franco Crivellari (University of Padua)
Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio (University of Padua)
Nicola Ferro (University of Padua)

Multilingual Text Classification using Ontologies
Gerard de Melo (Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University Frankfurt)
Stefan Siersdorfer (Max-Planck-Institute for Computer Science)

Using visual-textual mutual information and entropy for inter-modal document indexing
Jean Martinet (National Institute of Informatics)
Shin'ichi Satoh (National Institute of Informatics)

A Study of Global Inference Algorithms in Multi-Document Summarization
Ryan McDonald (Google Inc.)

Document Representation using Global Association Distance Model
José E. Medina-Pagola (Advanced Technologies Application Centre (CENATAV))
Ansel Y. Rodríguez-González (Advanced Technologies Application Centre (CENATAV))
Abdel Hechavarría-Díaz (Advanced Technologies Application Centre (CENATAV))
José Hernández-Palancar (Advanced Technologies Application Centre (CENATAV))

Sentence Level Sentiment Analysis in the Presence of Conjuncts Using Linguistic Analysis
Arun Meena (Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur)
Prabhakar Tadinanda (Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur)

PageRank: When Order Changes
Massimo Melucci (University of Padua)
Luca Pretto (University of Padua)

Model Tree Learning for Query Term Weighting in Question Answering
Christof Monz (Queen Mary, University of London)

Examining repetition in user search behaviour
Mark Sanderson (Microsoft Research)
Susan Dumais (Microsoft Research)

Popularity Weighted Ranking for Academic Digital Libraries
Yang Sun (The Pennsylvania State University)
C. Lee Giles (The Pennsylvania State University)

Naming Functions for the Vector Space Model
Yannis Tzitzikas (University of Crete and FORTH)
Yannis Theoharis (University of Crete and FORTH)

Effective use of semantic structure in XML retrieval
Roelof van Zwol (Yahoo! Research)

Searching Documents Based on Relevance and Type
Jun Xu (Microsoft Research Asia)
Yunbo Cao (Microsoft Research Asia)
Hang Li (Microsoft Research Asia)
Nick Craswell (Microsoft Research Cambridge)
Yalou Huang (College of Software, Nankai University)

Investigation of the Effectiveness of Cross-Media Indexing
Murat Yakici (University of Strathclyde)
Fabio Crestani (University of Strathclyde)

Improve Ranking by Using Image Information
Qing Yu (Microsoft Research Asia)
Shuming Shi (Microsoft Research Asia)
Zhiwei Li (Microsoft Research Asia)
Ji-Rong Wen (Microsoft Research Asia)
Wei-Ying Ma (Microsoft Research Asia)

N-Step PageRank for Web Search
Li Zhang (Beijing Jiaotong University)
Tao Qin (Tsinghua University)
Tie-Yan Liu (Microsoft Research Asia)
Ying Bao (Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Hang Li (Microsoft Research Asia)

Authorship Attribution via combination of evidence
Ying Zhao (RMIT University)
Phil Vines (RMIT University)


5 April


Keynote: Marco Gori

5 April 9.30-10.30

Chair: Claudio Carpineto

Learning in hyperlinked environments
Marco Gori (Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione Università di Siena)

Multimedia IR and Evaluation

5 April 10.50-12.30

Chair: Arjen de Vries

Classifier Fusion for SVM-Based Multimedia Semantic Indexing
Stephane Ayache (CLIPS/IMAG)
Georges Quenot (CLIPS/IMAG)
Jerome Gensel (LSR/IMAG)

Search of Spoken Documents Retrieves Well Recognized Transcripts
Mark Sanderson (University of Sheffield)
Xiao Mang Shou (University of Sheffield)

A Retrieval Evaluation Methodology for Incomplete Relevance Assessments
Mark Baillie (University of Strathclyde)
Leif Azzopardi (University of Glasgow)
Ian Ruthven (University of Strathclyde)

Evaluating the query-independent object features for the relevancy prediction
Andres Masegosa (University of Granada)
Hideo Joho (University of Glasgow)
Joemon M. Jose (University of Glasgow)

XML and Web IR

5 April 14.00-15.40

Chair: Lee Giles

Using Topic-shift for Focussed Access to XML Repositories
Elham Ashoori (Queen Mary, University of London)
Mounia Lalmas (Queen Mary, University of London)

Feature- and query-based table of contents generation for XML documents
Zoltan Szlavik (Queen Mary University of London)
Anastasios Tombros (Queen Mary University of London)
Mounia Lalmas (Queen Mary University of London)

Setting Per-field Normalisation Hyper-parameters for the Named-page Finding Search Task
Ben He (University of Glasgow)
Iadh Ounis (University of Glasgow)

Combining evidence for relevance criteria: a framework and experiments in web retrieval
Theodora Tsikrika (Queen Mary, University of London)
Mounia Lalmas (Queen Mary, University of London)

Classification and Clustering

5 April 16.00-17.40

Chair: Giovanni Semeraro

The Utility of Information Extraction in the Classification of Books
Tom Betts (University of Edinburgh)
Maria Milosavljevic (University of Edinburgh)
Jon Oberlander (University of Edinburgh)

Combined Syntactic and Semanitc Kernels for Text Classification
Stephan Bloehdorn (Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe (TH))
Alessandro Moschitti (University of Rome Tor Vergata)

A Probabilistic Model for Clustering Text Documents with Multiple Fields
Shanfeng Zhu (Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University)
Ichigaku Takigawa (Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University)
Shuqin Zhang (Department of Mathematics, The University of Hong Kong)
Hiroshi Mamitsuka (Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University)

Fast Large-Scale Spectral Clustering by Sequential Shrinkage Optimization
Tie-Yan Liu (Microsoft Research Asia)
Huai-Yuan Yang (Peking University)
Xin Zheng (Tsinghua University)
Tao Qin (Tsinghua University)
Wei-Ying Ma (Microsoft Research Asia)

Closing

5 April 17.40-18.10

Presentation of ECIR 2008
Iadh Ounis (University of Glasgow)