Yahoo! at SIGIR 2008
The 31st Annual International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) brought together a diverse group of over 500 attendees from academia and industry to the exotic island-nation of Singapore. Yahoo! was in the spotlight once again, snapping up three slots on the list of fully accepted papers, and six posters.
Also worthy of note were two tutorials and five workshops given on various IR topics that were highly attended by conference-goers. Yahoo! Researcher Evgeniy Gabrilovich co-organized the 1st Workshop on Information Retrieval for Advertising, which served as an open forum for discussing new ideas and research trends relevant to online advertising.
Notable topics of interest at the conference included relevance feedback, probabilistic models, summarization (and its applicability to spam/dup-detection), and text classification.
There were other highlights during the week in Singapore. Head of Yahoo! Research Prabhakar Raghavan was invited to give a talk entitled “New Sciences for a New Web” as part of the National Grid Distinguished Speaker Series, organized by the National Grid Office at the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore.
The release of Raghavan’s latest book, “Introduction to Information Retrieval,” was timed perfectly to coincide with the conference. Copies of the book, raffled off at the Cambridge University press table, were signed by Raghavan at the Yahoo! booth one afternoon. Several conference attendees claimed that the book was sold out on Amazon shortly after its release.
After the main conference, Yahoo! Researchers Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Rosie Jones, Don Metzler, and Vanessa Murdock visited the National University of Singapore (NUS) and presented talks on the work at Yahoo! Research and an overview of the company. The visit also included meetings with students and faculty, who were eager to discuss future collaboration opportunities with Yahoo! Research.
As a break from talks and conference going, about 100 invited guests flocked to Indochine Bar Opiume to attend Yahoo!’s signature party. Located at the mouth of the Singapore River, the party venue sits at the entrance of the Asian Civilisations Museum, located in the cluster of buildings at Empress Place – once the offices of the colonial government that ran Singapore. Party-goers sipped on Yahoo! Slings (Yahoo!’s version of a popular local cocktail) in the picturesque setting as they put their grey matter to work on the party challenge – a list of anagrams related to SIGIR and Singapore.
Overall, the week at SIGIR 2008 was a significant showcase of talent, research and innovation for Yahoo! – a reflection of its hard work and dedication that is setting the benchmark for others to follow.
Yahoo! SIGIR papers:
“A User Browsing Model to Predict Search Engine Click Data from Past Observations,”
G. Dupret and B. Piwowarski
“Optimizing Relevance and Revenue in Ad Search: A Query Substitution Approach,”
F. Radlinski, A. Broder, P. Ciccolo, E. Gabrilovich, V. Josifovski and L. Riedel
“Resln: A Combination of Results Caching and Index Pruning for High-performance Web Search Engines,”
G. Skobeltsyn, F. Junqueira, V. Plachouras and R. Baeza-Yates
