Sneak Preview of IR Watch

The current issue of IRW-2007-08 should be out within the next few days. The Association Rules Part 2 discuses how association rule mining techniques from market basket can be applied to Web Mining.

Association Rule Mining Thesaurus

Here is a 2004 paper on Association Thesaurus Construction for Interactive Query Expansion based on Association Rule Mining

The article discusses basic association rule mining concepts like support, confidence, and pruning as we described in Association Rules Part 1 (July issue of IR Watch – The Newsletter). BTW, read Part 2 in the August issue.

August 2007 IR Conferences

Here is a list of IR conferences scheduled for August, 2007:

Conceptual Similarity and Conceptual Mapping

I came across a relatively old paper authored by researchers at Indiana University and Institute for Human and Machine Cognition: Assessing Conceptual Similarity to Support Concept Mapping

Indeed, it seems like a great concept.

Interview with Vint Cerf

Omaya Sosa Pascual over at El Nuevo Dia published (07/22/07) an Interview with Vint Cerf, while he was visiting Puerto Rico during the ICANN Public Meeting. As the newspaper, the interview is in Spanish. I have the priviledge of attending the talk Dr. Cerf delivered before the Law School of University of Puerto Rico.

Revisiting EXACT Search Shortcuts in Google

I have discussed AND and EXACT searches many times, but did you know the following?

In addition to enclosing search terms with double quotes (“like this”), in some search engines one can invoke a shortcut to an EXACT search by using certain characters that serve as sequence connectors. These work in the same way double quotes work. The most common is the hyphen; e.g. 

The Risks of Thesaurus-based Expansions

SEOmoz has a great discussion on why at times search engines don’t return relevant results; that is, why some results perceived by users as being not relevant to their information needs (queries) are ranked high by search engines.

Some bloggers at SEOmoz attribute this in part to precision and recall issues. We have covered these topics in different occasions; so, let revisit some points along those lines.

Information Retrieval Conferences – July 2007

Here is a list of IR conferences, scheduled for the rest of July in The Netherlands.

SEOs and Still Their LSI Misconceptions

I just came across this article

http://seo-and-google.blogspot.com/2007/07/5-tips-to-effective-seo-keyword.html

by Valerie DiCarlo and honestly don’t know from where these marketers learn all these misconceptions regarding LSI. Perhaps she has been misled as well by the usual suspects and is just trying to make some honest comments she truly believes. Unfortunately most of her’s are incorrect. I’m commenting her lines, one by one.

Glasgow Summer School on Multimedia Semantics

Glasgow Summer School on Multimedia Semantics, organized by the Information Retrieval Group at Glasgow University, is in full swing now (July 15-21, 2007)