Language proficiency tests are a useful tool for evaluating learner progress, if the test difficulty fits the level of the learner. In this work, we describe a generalized framework for test difficulty prediction that is applicable to several languages and test types. In addition, we develop two ranking strategies for candidate evaluation inspired by automatic solving methods based on language ...

The assumptions underlying the Probability Ranking Principle (PRP) have led to a number of alternative approaches that cater or compensate for the PRP’s limitations. All alternatives deviate from the PRP by incorporating dependencies. This results in a re-ranking that promotes or demotes documents depending upon their relationship with the documents that have been already ranked. In this paper,...

Recent evaluation results from Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) indicate that current information retrieval methods are effective to retrieve relevant documents for geographic queries, but they have severe difficulties to generate a pertinent ranking of them. Motivated by these results in this paper we present a novel re-ranking method, which employs information obtained through a relevan...

Heuristic search is one of the most successful approaches to classical planning, finding solution paths in large state spaces. A major focus has been the development of domainindependent heuristic functions. One recent method are partial delete relaxation heuristics, improving over the standard delete relaxation heuristic through imposing a set C of conjunctions to be treated as atomic. Practic...

This paper described the real-time search system we built for TREC 2013 microblog track. We focused on query expansion and ranking algorithm and employed different strategies. For query expansion, we implied pseudo-relevance feedback using WAF algorithms and a refined tf ∗ idf formula. For re-ranking part, our system makes use of various tweets’ features, such as expansion terms, URL informatio...

We developed the Biomedical Informatics Researchers ranking website (rank.informatics-review.com) to overcome many of the limitations of previous scientific productivity ranking strategies. The website is composed of four key components that work together to create an automatically updating ranking website: (1) list of biomedical informatics researchers, (2) Google Scholar scraper, (3) display ...

With university rankings gaining both in popularity and influence, university administrators develop strategies to improve their rankings. To better understand this competition for ranking, we present an adjacent category logit model to address the localized nature of ranking competition and include lagged rank as an independent variable to account for stickiness of ranking. Calibrating our mod...