Containing enormous amounts of various types of data, web has become the main source for finding the desired information. Meanwhile retrieving the desired information in such a vast heterogeneous environment is much difficult. This situation has led to a drastic increase in the popularity of internet search engines. Undoubtedly, designing both efficient and effective ranking strategies as the b...

Every day, editors rank news articles for placement within their newspapers. In this paper, we investigate how news article ranking can be performed automatically. In particular, we investigate the blogosphere as a prime source of evidence, on the intuition that bloggers, and by extension their blog posts, can indicate interest in one news article or another. Moreover, we propose to model this ...

The added-value of search engines is, apparently, undoubted. Their rapid evolution over the last decade has transformed them into the most important source of information and knowledge. From the end user side, search engine success implies correct results in fast and accurate manner, while also ranking of search results on a given query has to be directly correlated to the user anticipated resp...

In Open Source Software (OSS) projects, participants initially communicate with others and then may become developers if they are deemed worthy by the community. Recent studies indicate that the abundance of established social links of a participant is the strongest predictor to his/her promotion. Having reliable rankings of the candidates is key to recruiting and maintaining a successful opera...

We analyze the performance of source sentence reordering, a common reordering approach, using oracle experiments on German-English and English-German translation. First, we show that the potential of this approach is very promising. Compared to a monotone translation, the optimally reordered source sentence leads to improvements of up to 4.6 and 6.2 BLEU points, depending on the language. Furth...

Implicit feedback (e.g., clicks, dwell times) is an attractive source of training data for Learning-to-Rank, but it inevitably suffers from biases such as position bias. It was recently shown how counterfactual inference techniques can provide a rigorous approach for handling these biases, but existing methods are restricted to the special case of optimizing average rank for linear ranking func...

A fundamental goal of search engines is to identify, given a query, documents that have relevant text. This is intrinsically difficult because the query and the document may use different vocabulary, or the document may contain query words without being relevant. We investigate neural word embeddings as a source of evidence in document ranking. We train a word2vec embedding model on a large unl...

Despite a considerable body of research, there is no clarity about the basic properties of melodic similarity, such as whether or not it constitutes a metric space, or whether it is a more complex phenomenon. An experiment conducted by Typke et al., used as a basis for the MIREX2005 melodic-similarity modelling contest, represents a particularly rich source of data. In the experiment, for each ...