Seminar "Frontiers in Web Search" SS 2013
Dr. Klaus Berberich, Johannes Hoffart, Stephan Seufert, Mohamed Yahya
Contents
The seminar covers current topics in web search. All talks will be based on recent research papers, both from industrial research labs and academia, published in top-tier conferences such as SIGIR, WSDM, WWW, and CIKM.
Organization
- Regular meetings take place on Thursdays at 16:00-17:30 in Room 023, Building E1.4 (MPI-INF).
- The kickoff meeting will take place on April 18th. If you want to participate in the seminar, you have to attend this meeting to register!
- Students who want to attend the seminar should have some background knowledge in Information Retrieval.
Requirements for the Certificate
- Attend all talks - not just your own. We will keep track of participation! If you are sick, please let us know in advance by writing a short mail.
- Read your paper and other related literature.
- Contact your tutor at least two weeks before your talk and present an intended outline of your talk.
- Prepare a 45 minute talk about your topic that introduces the matter to your fellow students. This is about twice the size of a regular conference talk, so there should be enough time to present some background information on the topic. Try to pick the most interesting, challenging or futuristic contribution(s) from the paper. You are very welcome to discuss any potential weaknesses or problems of the paper in your talk. If you are unsure about what to present, ask your tutor. Note that, even though the conference slides of some papers are available on the Web, we expect you to prepare your own slides.
- You must send your slides to and discuss them with your tutor by the Monday before your talk (by 16:00) at the latest, otherwise your talk will be cancelled (this is a hard deadline).
- Both the slides and the presentation itself must be given in English. Otherwise, some students will not be able to follow all talks, which is one of the main purposes of the seminar. After the presentation, there will be a discussion in which all fellow students are encouraged to ask questions. We will keep track of your participation (i.e., if you ask questions) and, of course, the answers of the presenter.
- For each talk, two fellow students will be preselected as opponents. Their role is to prepare tough questions to challenge the paper presented in the talk (not the talk itself or the speaker!). To make life a little easier, the preliminary version of the slides will be sent to the opponents on the Monday before the talk. However, as interaction is an important part of science, we expect that every participant actively participates in the discussions.
- Four weeks after the talk, the presenter has to submit a written summary of the topic of the talk. The focus of this report should be on pointing out strengths and weaknesses of the approach presented in the paper, not just summarizing the paper. Reports have to be written using this template and are up to 8 pages.
- Finally, there will be another meeting to give feedback on your talk and report.
- Your final grade will be influenced by the following components: Your oral presentation, the knowledge about your topic (your answers to questions after the presentation), the questions you asked as opponent, your general participation in the seminar, and your written report.
Agenda
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04/18/2013 (Kick-off Meeting)
-
05/02/2013 (Search for Kids)
- Torres and Weber: What and how children search on the web, CIKM 2011, [Paper]
- Eickhoff et al.: A combined topical/non-topical approach to identifying web sites for children, WSDM 2011, [Paper]
- Speaker: Som Nath / Opponents: Cholpon Degenbaeva, Konstantin Poddubnyy / Tutor: Klaus Berberich
- [Slides] [Report]
-
05/09/2013 (Christi Himmelfart)
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05/16/2013 (Points of Interest)
- Shaw et al.: Learning to rank for spatiotemporal search, WSDM 2013, [Paper]
- Lv and Lymberopoulos: An exploration of ranking heuristics in mobile local search, SIGIR 2012, [Paper]
- Speaker: Pedro Colomina Medina / Opponents: Bartosz Kolasa, Som Nath / Tutor: Klaus Berberich
- [Slides] [Report]
-
05/23/2013 (User eXperience)
- Hecht et al.: Explanatory semantic relatedness and explicit specialization for exploratory search, SIGIR 2012, [Paper]
- Haas et al.: Enhanced results for web search, SIGIR 2011, [Paper]
- Speaker: Cholpon Degenbaeva / Opponents: Irina Beryozkina, Muhammad Bilal Zafar / Tutor: Mohamed Yahya
- [Slides] [Report]
-
05/30/2013 (Fronleichnam)
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06/06/2013 (Collaboration & Crowdsourcing)
- Bozzon et al.: Answering search queries with CrowdSearcher, WWW 2012, [Paper]
- Horowitz and Kamvar: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine, WWW 2010, [Paper]
- Speaker: Khaled Sharara / Opponents: Bartosz Kolasa, Govinda Sicheneder / Tutor: Mohamed Yahya
- [Slides] [Report]
-
06/13/2013 (Structured Data)
- He et al.: Crawling deep web entity pages, WSDM 2013, [Paper]
- Elmeleegy et al.: Harvesting Relational Tables from Lists on the Web, PVLDB 2009, [Paper]
- Speaker: Muhammad Bilal Zafar / Opponents: Irina Beryozkina, Khaled Sharara / Tutor: Johannes Hoffart
- [Slides] [Report]
-
06/20/2013 (Semantic Search)
- Pound et al.: Interpreting keyword queries over web knowledge bases, CIKM 2012, [Paper]
- Mass and Sagiv: Language models for keyword search over data graphs, WSDM 2012, [Paper]
- Speaker: Irina Beryozkina / Opponents: Som Nath, Muhammad Bilal Zafar / Tutor: Stephan Seufert
- [Slides] [Report]
-
07/04/2013 (Monetization)
- Ravi et al.: Automatic generation of bid phrases for online advertising, WSDM 2010, [Paper]
- Li et al.: Towards a Theory Model for Product Search, WWW 2011, [Paper]
- Speaker: Konstantin Poddubnyy / Opponents: Pedro Colomina Medina, Govinda Sicheneder / Tutor: Klaus Berberich
- [Slides] [Report]
-
07/11/2013 (Microblogs)
- Teevan et al.: #TwitterSearch: A Comparison of Microblog Search and Web Search, WSDM 2011, [Paper]
- Meij et al.: Adding semantics to microblog posts, WSDM 2012, [Paper]
- Speaker: Bartosz Kolasa / Opponents: Cholpon Degenbaeva, Konstantin Poddubnyy / Tutor: Stephan Seufert
- [Slides] [Report]
-
07/18/2013 (Novelty & Diversity)
- Dang and Croft: Diversity by proportionality: an election-based approach to search result diversification, SIGIR 2012, [Paper]
- Santos et al.: Intent-aware search result diversification, SIGIR 2011, [Paper]
- Speaker: Govinda Sicheneder / Opponents: Khaled Sharara, Pedro Colomina Medina / Tutor: Johannes Hoffart
- [Slides] [Report]
-
07/25/2013 (Question Answering) [Canceled!]
- Singh: Entity based Q&A retrieval, EMNLP 2012, [Paper]
- Shtok et al.: Learning from the past: answering new questions with past answers, WWW 2012, [Paper]
- Speaker: Ervina Cergani / Opponents: N/A / Tutor: Mohamed Yahya
Literature
- W. B. Croft, D. Metzler und T. Strohman: Search Engines - Information Retrieval in Practice, Pearson Education, 2010. [Website]
- C. D. Manning, P. Raghavan und H. Schütze: Introduction to Information Retrieval, Cambridge University Press, 2008. [Website]
- R. Baeza-Yates und B. Ribeiro-Neto: Modern Information Retrieval, Addison Wesley, 2011. [Website]
- J. Zobel und A. Moffat: Inverted files for text search engines, ACM Comput. Surv. 38(2), 2006. [Paper]
- S. Brin und L. Page: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Computer Networks 30(1-7), 1998. [Paper]
- A. Arasu, J. Cho, H. Garcia-Molina, A. Paepcke und S. Raghavan: Searching the Web, ACM TOIT 1(1), 2001. [Paper]
- J. Dean: Challenges in Building Large-Scale Information Retrieval Systems, WSDM 2009. [Slides]
