Archive for May, 2007

IR Thoughts Legacy Posts

May 3, 2007

We have a list of legacy posts that were published at the old home of IR Thoughts. The IR Thoughts Legacy Posts List is available at

http://www.miislita.com/blog/irthoughts-legacy-posts.html

The list was generated by converting the mdb Access database into an XLS file with third party convertware (software that converts documents into different formats). After sorting and removing irrelevant columns the output was saved as an HTML document. The entire process was pretty much straightforward.

To get the full text of a particular post contact Dr. Garcia at admin@miislita.com.

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Users-Machines Perception of Relevance

May 2, 2007

How do users and machines assess relevance? That is, how do they determine what is/is not relevant content upon a given information need like a query?

For users, this is mostly a visual experience. By contrast for machine this is mostly a parsing experience. So we end up with a fascinating machine learning problem.

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AIRWEB07 Conference: Spammers and SEOs Served with the Papers

May 2, 2007

As a program committee member of the W3C AIRWEB07 Workshop to be held in Banff, Canada, I was asked by its organizers (Dr. Brian Davison, Lehigh University; Dr. Carlos Castillo, Yahoo! Research - Spain; Dr. Kumar Chellapilla, Microsoft Live Labs) to give updates regarding the conference, which I did.

Since this is the new home of IR Thoughts and some of you might be new readers, I am reposting the program, complete with links to the presentations.

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IRWatch May Issue: Demystifying LSI

May 1, 2007

If you are a subscriber, the current issue or IRWatch - The Newsletter should arrive to your inbox during the day. If not, let me know.

The piece is a summary of my 03/8,9/07 presentation at the OJOBuscador Congress 2 in Madrid, Spain. My topic was Demystifying LSI for SEOs

The material presented at the conference has been heavily edited and adapted to the newsletter. It is presented using figures and side-by-side comparisons of myths and facts. This time I wanted to skip the math and lengthy explanations.

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