SIGIR 2010 Best Paper Award Winners

The best paper awards were awarded last night at the banquet.

Best Paper Award

Assessing the Scenic Route: Measuring the Value of Search Trails in Web Logs, R. White, J. Huang

In this paper, we present a log-based study estimating the user value of trail following. We compare the relevance, topic coverage, topic diversity, novelty, and utility of full trails over that provided by sub-trails, trail origins (landing pages), and trail destinations (pages where trails end). Our findings demonstrate significant value to users in following trails, especially for certain query types. The findings have implications for the design of search systems, including trail recommendation systems that display trails on search result pages.

Best Student Paper

A comparison of general vs personalized affective models for the prediction of topical relevance, I. Arapakis, K. Athanasakos, J. Jose

The main goal is to determine whether the behavioural differences of users have an impact on the models' ability to determine topical relevance and if, by personalising them, we can improve their accuracy. For modelling relevance we extract a set of features from the facial expression data and classify them using Support Vector Machines. Our initial evaluation indicates that accounting for individual differences and applying personalisation introduces, in most cases, a noticeable improvement in the models' performance.