Associate Professor Miles Efron will participate in the 39th International Conference of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR). The conference will be held July 17-21 in Pisa, Italy.
Efron and his doctoral students Craig Willis and Garrick Sherman will present the short paper, “What Makes a Query Temporally Sensitive.”
From the abstract: This work takes an in-depth look at the factors that affect manual classifications of “temporally sensitive” information needs. We use qualitative and quantitative techniques to analyze 660 topics from the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) previously used in the experimental evaluation of temporal retrieval models. Regression analysis is used to model previous manual classifications. We identify factors and potential problems with previous classifications, proposing principles and guidelines for future work on temporal retrieval models.
Efron’s research areas include information retrieval in emerging domains such as social media and large collections of digitized books; diachronic issues in information retrieval; and human interactions with information search and retrieval systems. His current work focuses on information filtering problems, with special emphasis on applying unsupervised and semi-supervised statistical learning to filtering-related tasks.