2010 - Edgar Meij

Combining Concepts and Language Models for Information Access

10/12/2010 Publications Theses No Comments

Since the middle of last century, information retrieval has gained an increasing interest. Since its inception, much research has been devoted to finding optimal ways of representing both documents and queries, as well as improving ways of matching one with the other. In cases where document annotations or explicit semantics…

Archieven Linken met Semantische Zoekmachines

01/12/2010 Publications Publicity No Comments

In toenemende mate worden grootschalige archieven toegankelijk gemaakt voor een breed publiek. Prominente voorbeelden worden gegeven door de archieven van landelijke dagbladen, nationale archieven, overheidsarchieven, archieven onder beheer van de Koninklijke Bibliotheek, televisiearchieven zoals beheerd door het Nationaal Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid en, meer algemeen, door archieven van erfgoedinstellingen.…

Supervised query modeling using Wikipedia

14/07/2010 Conference Papers Publications No Comments

In a web retrieval setting, there is a clear need for precision enhancing methods. For example, the query “the secret garden” (a novel that has been adapted into movies and musicals) is a query that is easily led astray because of the generality of the individual query terms. While some…

Conceptual language models for domain-specific retrieval

02/07/2010 Journal Papers Publications No Comments

Over the years, various meta-languages have been used to manually enrich documents with conceptual knowledge of some kind. Examples include keyword assignment to citations or, more recently, tags to websites. In this paper we propose generative concept models as an extension to query modeling within the language modeling framework, which…

Entity Search: Building Bridges between Two Worlds

20/04/2010 Publications Workshop Papers No Comments

We have come to depend on technological resources to create order and find meaning in the ever-growing amount of online data. One frequently recurring type of query in web search are queries containing named entities (persons, organizations, locations, etc.): we organize our environments around entities that are meaningful to us.…

Enabling Data Transport between Web Services

20/04/2010 Conference Papers Publications No Comments

Despite numerous benefits, many Web Services (WS) face problems with respect to data transport, either because SOAP doesn’t offer a scalable way of transporting large data-sets or because orchestration workflows (WF) don’t move data around efficiently. In this paper we address both problems with the development of the ProxyWS. This…

Heuristic Ranking and Diversification of Web Documents

20/01/2010 Publications Unrefereed No Comments

We describe the participation of the University of Amsterdam’s Intelligent Systems Lab in the web track at TREC 2009. We participated in the adhoc and diversity task. We find that spam is an important issue in the ad hoc task and that Wikipedia-based heuristic optimization approaches help to boost the…

Topical Diversity and Relevance Feedback

20/01/2010 Publications Unrefereed No Comments

We describe the participation of the University of Amsterdam’s Intelligent Systems Lab in the relevance feedback track at TREC 2009. Our main conclusion for the relevance feedback track is that a topical diversity approach provides good feedback documents. Further, we find that our relevance feedback algorithm seems to help most…