We tackle the problem of improving microblog retrieval algorithms by proposing a robust structural representation of (query, tweet) pairs. We employ these structures in a principled kernel learning framework that automatically extracts and learns highly discriminative features. We test the generalization power of our approach on the TREC Microblog 2011 and 2012 tasks. We find that relational syntactic features generated by structural kernels are effective for learning to rank (L2R) and can easily be combined with those of other existing systems to boost their accuracy. In particular, the results show that our L2R approach improves on almost all the participating systems at TREC, only using their raw scores as a single feature. Our method yields an average increase of 5% in retrieval effectiveness and 7 positions in system ranks.

Recent years have witnessed a persistent interest in generating pseudo test collections, both for training and evaluation purposes. We describe a method for generating queries and relevance judgments for microblog search in an unsupervised way. Our starting point is this intuition: tweets with a hashtag are relevant to the topic covered by the hashtag and hence to a suitable query derived from the hashtag. Our baseline method selects all commonly used hashtags, and all associated tweets as relevance judgments; we then generate a query from these tweets. Next, we generate a timestamp for each query, allowing us to use temporal information in the training process. We then enrich the generation process with knowledge derived from an editorial test collection for microblog search.

Expertise retrieval has attracted significant interest in the field of information retrieval. Expert finding has been studied extensively, with less attention going to the complementary task of expert profiling, that is, automatically identifying topics about which a person is knowledgeable. We describe a test collection for expert profiling in which expert users have self‐selected their knowledge areas. Motivated by the sparseness of this set of knowledge areas, we report on an assessment experiment in which academic experts judge a profile that has been automatically generated by state‐of‐the‐art expert‐profiling algorithms; optionally, experts can indicate a level of expertise for relevant areas. Experts may also give feedback on the quality of the system‐generated knowledge areas. We report on a content analysis of these comments and gain insights into what aspects of profiles matter to experts. We provide an error analysis of the system‐generated profiles, identifying factors that help explain why certain experts may be harder to profile than others. We also analyze the impact on evaluating expert‐profiling systems of using self‐selected versus judged system‐generated knowledge areas as ground truth; they rank systems somewhat differently but detect about the same amount of pairwise significant differences despite the fact that the judged system‐generated assessments are more sparse.

Recent years show an increasing interest in vertical search: searching within a particular type of information. Understanding what people search for in these "verticals" gives direction to research and provides pointers for the search engines themselves. In this paper we analyze the search logs of one particular vertical: people search engines. Based on an extensive analysis of the logs of a search engine geared towards finding people, we propose a classification scheme for people search at three levels: (a) queries, (b) sessions, and (c) users. For queries, we identify three types, (i) event-based high-profile queries (people that become "popular" because of an event happening), (ii) regular high-profile queries (celebrities), and (iii) low-profile queries (other, less-known people). We present experiments on automatic classification of queries. On the session level, we observe five types: (i) family sessions (users looking for relatives), (ii) event sessions (querying the main players of an event), (iii) spotting sessions (trying to "spot" different celebrities online), (iv) polymerous sessions (sessions without a clear relation between queries), and (v) repetitive sessions (query refinement and copying). Finally, for users we identify four types: (i) monitors, (ii) spotters, (iii) followers, and (iv) polymers.