Yahoo! Research at WSDM 2009

Yahoo! Research led the technical program at the Second ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2009), held February 9 to 12 in Barcelona, Spain, authoring almost a quarter of the total accepted papers – including the Best Paper Award -- and holding several positions on the program committees.

This year, the conference maintained its energy from the previous year as it brought together members from academia and industry to a common forum for Web IR and data mining. Papers covered a wide range of hot topics, well-summarized by the tag cloud printed on the conference t-shirts. Common themes included query intent detection, search results diversification, and tag-based clustering and classification.

Yahoo! Researcher Fernando Diaz took home the Best Paper Award for his work on the selective integration of news content into Web results based on the classification of the newsworthiness of each query.

Together with Omar Alonso, Yahoo! researcher Hugo Zaragoza organized a workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval (ESAIR 09). The workshop included long and short paper presentations as well as demos, group discussions, and break-out sessions. The audience enjoyed the format and mix of modeling and application papers.
The conference this year included a new Late Breaking Results session to allow the presentation of more recent, risky and ground breaking research ideas, methods, results and position statements. The award went to Irem Arikan and co-authors for their paper on applying a language model approach for improving the retrieval effectiveness for queries with temporal expressions. Eytan Adar and co-authors received the best student paper award for their study of the dynamics of the content and structure of Web documents of varying popularity over a fine-grained timescale.

It’s quite apparent that WSDM is rapidly moving towards establishing itself among the major information retrieval conferences.