DATA AND KNOWLEDGE

ENGINEERING GROUP

General Course Information

On this web page, information for the seminar 'Hot Topics in Information Retrieval', which is held during the Summer Term 2011 by Farag Ahmed, Tatiana Gossen and Andreas Nürnberger, is provided.

Alle Informationen auf dieser Webseite sind auf Englisch angegeben, um auch englischsprachigen Studierenden die Teilnahme am Seminar zu ermöglichen. Vorträge und Ausarbeitungen können sowohl in Englisch als auch in Deutsch gehalten bzw. erstellt werden.

Description of topics

This seminar is devoted to emerging trends in Information Retrieval like Cross-language IR, Children IR, Personalized IR and Opinion mining.

Cross-language IR (CLIR)

The increasing diversity of the Internet web sites has created millions of multilingual resources in the world wide web. Cross-language IR deals with retrieving information written in a language different from the language of the user's query. For example, users may write their queries in German but retrieve relevant documents written in French. Following topics are available:

• Cross language Information Retrieval: an overview of existing methods.
• CLIR interaction tools: analysis of appropriate user interfaces and interaction sequences.
• Multilingual Information Retrieval: an overview of issues and existing solutions to tackle them (e.g. for chinese , Arabic langauges etc.).
• Cross language Information Retrieval evaluations.

Children IR

The Internet today is widely used by children to search for new information and communicate. Unfortunately, most of the existing Information Retrieval (IR) solutions are designed for adults who have shown to have different search behavior and cognitive skills than children. Thus, the research on children information retrieval in terms of both user interfaces and underlying algorithms is very important. Following topics are available:

• What are the differences of children's and adults' web search? Impact on User Interface.
• What are the differences of children's and adults' web search? Impact on retrieval algorithms.
• What is their on children IR online available? Your own analysis of existing search engines (ex. from the usability perspective) and researchers' recommendations.
• Analysis of (common) web search engines studies. Evaluation and summary of different search parameters like query length, session length, etc. with own interpretation of the causes for this evaluation.

Personalized IR

Current information retrieval systems return the same retrieval results to all users for identical queries, regardless of varied user interests and information needs. Personalized IR provides information for each user based on his/her interests .i.e., for a specific given query, personalized IR can provide different retrieval results for different users. Furthermore, personalized IR organizes retrieval results differently based on the user's interests, preferences, and information needs. Following topics are available:

• Sources of Personalization: Search History, Current Context, Collaborative approaches etc.
• Personalization of information retrieval through user profiling. User Modeling in Personalized Systems.
• Content and Collaborative-Based Personalization. Collaborative Filtering.
• Contextual Search.

 Opinion mining

An important part of our information-seeking behavior is to find out what other people think about specific topic. Opinion mining (OM) is a recent discipline at the crossroads of information retrieval and computational linguistics which is concerned not with the topic a document is about, but with the opinion it expresses. Opinion mining is used to identify and extract subjective information in source materials. Due to the abundance of opinion-rich resources that reside in online review sites, personal blogs etc. new challenges arise in how to use information technologies in order to search and understand the opinions of others. Following topics are available:

• Opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Construction of an Opinion/Review Search Engine.
• Linguistic resources for Opinion mining.
• Opinion summarization.

Course Schedule and Room Assignments

Presentations

Course Staff

If you have any questions concerning the lectures or assignments please contact (if possible by email)

• Farag Ahmed
  E-Mail: farag.ahmed@ovgu.de
• Tatiana Gossen
  E-Mail: tatiana.gossen@ovgu.de
• Andreas Nürnberger
  E-Mail: andreas.nuernberger@ovgu.de

Requirements for the 'Schein'

The following criteria has to be fullfilled for the 'Schein':

• 20 minutes presentation (+10 minutes discussion) about an elected topic (topics can be elected in the first lesson): delivery of the slides 1 week before the presentation date.
• Active participation and reasonable discussion about the presentations.
• Write a scientific paper (hints will be given at the beginning of the seminar), 7-10 pages: delivery of the paper 1 week before the presentation date.
• participation in the other presentations.

If you need a 'benoteten Schein' you have to announce it in the first lesson!

Hints on the delivery

The delivery of the paper, the slides and the reports can be done by email to farag.ahmed@ovgu.de or tatiana.gossen@ovgu.de. Please send also the source file (word or latex document). The paper and the slides have to be send one week before the presentation date by wednesday at 8:00 am. The reports have to be send one day before the presentation date of the examined talk at 8:00 am. These deadlines must be strictly adhered.

Material

• Introduction (English)
  
• Introduction (German)
  
• Springer LNCS-Style
• Example Paper