Reviewing Papers: How-To

As reviewer of journal manuscripts and conference papers I normally look to see if the piece before me answers the following questions:

1. WHAT-WHY: What is the scientific problem at hand and why is important?
2. WHO-WHAT-WHY: Who proposed what previous solutions and why are these inadequate or incomplete?
3. WHAT-YOUR-WHY: What is your proposed solution and why is better?
4. HOW-WHAT: How is the solution implemented and what are the benefits or practical applications?
5. PROS-CONS-WHAT: What are the possible pros and cons of your solution and what are the next areas of research?

Research Channel, LRA, Microsoft, and more

I forget to mention that I’m attending ICANN this week, so most will be legacy posts –straight from the conference.

The ResearchChannel is a research consortium dedicated to serve as an online channel for the dissemination of cutting edge technologies. If you want to learn the real stuff under the hood of search engines, just do it through the ResearchChannel. Want to learn the difference between LSA(LSI) and LRA (Latent Relational Analysis)?

IR Relevance vs. Suggestion Task Relevance

This is a great topic for a graduate thesis: Traditional IR considers the problem of matching documents to a query as a single information need to be satisfied. However, since a system doesn’t know what is in the mind of users, the query itself can be a multiple information need.

When you think thoroughly this is why Web searching, how users search and reformulate queries on the Web, is different from, for example, IR searching –wherein user resource to query expansion and relevance feedback mechanisms.

Closeness, Proximity, Similarity, and Distance

Often a distinction between the terms given in the title of this post is not clear in the literature.

Closeness is a generic notion that can be expressed in terms of proximity, similarity or distance.

Ontologies as Expectations of Co-Occurrence

Title: Altering Document Term Vectors for Classification – Ontologies as Expectations of Co-occurrence

Authors: Meenakshi Nagarajan, Amit Sheth; LSDIS Lab, Dept. Of Computer Science, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA; Marcos Aguilera, Kimberly Keeton, Arif Merchant, Mustafa Uysal, HP Labs, Palo Alto, CA

This new study, presented at WWW2007, Banff, Canada, confirms the importance of co-occurrence, this time in relation with ontologies.

The abstract states:

Eigenvectors and Reggaeton Music = Eiggaeton

Eigenvectors and eigenvalues come in pairs; that is why we use the term eigenpair. Some have asked me about practical applications of eigenpairs. So this post goes.

Did you know the connection between eigenvectors and Reggaeton Music (or music in general)? How about eigenvectors and bridges, car designers, speakers, architecture, or oil companies?

Our Tutorials, Required Readings at University of Maryland

Yan Qu over at the College of Information Studies, University of Maryland taughts the graduate course

LBSC 670 Information Structure

For the course Qu selected as required readings our tutorials:

LSA: A Goldmine for Educators and Curriculum Developers

Marco Kalz, M.A. over at Educational Technology Expertise Centre Open University of the Netherlands, informed me months ago that the University of Netherlands was organizing the 1st European Workshop on LSA in Technology-Enhanced Learning. Marco is part of the Scientific Committee responsible for organizing the event and co-author of the workshop proceedings.

It is my pleasure to inform our readers that the event was a complete success. I will ask Marco for additional inside information, to perhaps include in our next issue of IRW Newsletter.

Thesis: A Hybrid Knowledge-based/Content-based Recommender

Here are some great news:

1. I am getting ready for my presentation at the Intektel International Conference and Expo. I am presenting the second day of the conference on “The Impact of Search Engines in the Internet”.

2. Next week we have the ARIN Conference (American Registry of Internet Numbers) in Puerto Rico, and in June we have also in San Juan, PR the 29th ICANN Conference. WOW!

3. Taschuk Morgan has written an excellent Honour Thesis in which kindly references our tutorial on Cosine Similarity and Term Weights. Morgan writes:

Thesis: Understanding LSI via the Term-Term Truncated Matrix

As we mentioned in IR Watch – The Newsletter (got a free subscription?), although LSI (LSA) itself is not first-order co-occurrence (see Prof. Tom Landauer: Introduction to Latent Semantic Analysis), a recent thesis from Regis Newo shows that high-order co-occurrence might be at the heart of LSI and is what makes the technique works. This 2005 thesis abstract on Understanding LSI via the Truncated Term-Term Matrix states: