The Text Mining, Search, and Navigation group (TMSN) works with large text collections, such as the Web, help and support, sites, discussion groups, e-mail, and intranets. We aim to extract and use knowledge from and about these collections and to help people find information more effectively within these collections.

A key area of our research is improving the efficiency of a user's interaction with large collections of information, so they can more easily find/explore/learn/share/buy/sell/meet/edit/express.

Our long-term goal is to develop a new foo, where foo is to today's search engine as a car is to a horse and buggy (where the horse is super old, and the buggy is headache-inducing squeaky and has two bad tires).

We also work on somewhat shorter-term projects, such as: improving the relevance and the reliability of our search functionality, gaining more understanding of the way search is used, building really cool infrastructure to make it easier to process zillions of bytes of data efficiently, etc., and of course, top secret project ZGX-103.

Primary Contact: Chris J.C. Burges
Andrew, Galen	Bilenko, Misha	Brill, Eric	Burges, Chris J.C.
Chaiken, Ronnie	Chandrasekar, Raman	Church, Ken	Cucerzan, Silviu-Petru
Photo Not Available Dekel, Ofer	Imig, Scott	Larcheveque, John	Photo Not Available Pastusiak, Andrzej
Photo Not Available Ramsey, Bill	Richardson, Matthew	Rounthwaite, Robert	Svore, Krysta
White, Ryen	Photo Not Available Wu, Qiang	Zhou, Dengyong
Affiliate Members
Dumais, Susan	Liu, Tie-Yan	Moore, Bob

• W. Dakka, S. Cucerzan. Augmenting Wikipedia with Named Entity Tags 2008 Proceedings of IJCNLP 2008
• P. Li, C.J.C. Burges, Q. Wu. Learning to Rank Using Classification and Gradient Boosting 2008 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 20
• M. Bilenko, R.W. White, M. Richardson, G.C. Murray. Talking the Talk vs. Walking the Walk: Salience of Information Needs in Querying vs. Browsing 2008 Proceedings of the 31st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR-2008)
• M. Bilenko, R.W. White. Mining the Search Trails of Surfing Crowds: Identifying Relevant Websites From User Activity 2008 Proceedings of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW-2008)
• R.W. White, M. Bilenko, S. Cucerzan. Leveraging Popular Destinations to Enhance Web Search Interaction 2008 ACM Transactions on the Web
• P. Singla, M. Richardson. Yes, There is a Correlation - From Social Networks to Personal Behavior on the Web 2008 Proceedings of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW-2008)
• S. Cucerzan. Large-Scale Named Entity Disambiguation Based on Wikipedia Data 2007 Proceedings of EMNLP-CoNLL 2007 708--716
• A. Jain, S. Cucerzan, S. Azzam. Acronym-Expansion Recognition and Ranking on the Web 2007 Proceedings of IEEE-IRI 2007
• R.W. White, M. Bilenko, S. Cucerzan. Studying the Use of Popular Destinations to Enhance Web Search Interaction 2007 Proceedings of SIGIR 2007 159--166
• S. Cucerzan, R.W. White. Query Suggestion based on User Landing Pages 2007 Proceedings of SIGIR 2007 875-876
• R.W. White, C.L.A. Clarke, S. Cucerzan. Comparing Query Logs and Pseudo-Relevance Feedback for Web-Search Query Refinement 2007 Proceedings of SIGIR 2007 831--832
• K.M. Svore, L. Vanderwende,, C.J.C. Burges. Enhancing Single-document Summarization by Combining RankNet and Third-party Sources 2007 Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
• K.M. Svore, Q. Wu, C.J.C. Burges, A. Raman. Improving Web Spam Classification using Rank-time Features 2007 Proceedings of Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web (AIRWeb)
• D. Zhou, C.J.C. Burges. Spectral Clustering and Transductive Learning with Multiple Views 2007 Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Machine Learning
• D. Zhou, C.J.C. Burges, Tao. Transductive Link Spam Detection 2007 Proceedings of Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web (AIRWeb)
• C.J.C. Burges, R. Ragno, Q.V. Le. Learning to Rank with Non-Smooth Cost Functions 2007 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19
• G. Andrew, J. Gao. Scalable training of L1-regularized log-linear models 2007 Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Machine Learning(ICML)
• J. Gao, G. Andrew, M. Johnson, K. Toutanova. A comparative study of parameter estimation methods for statistical natural language processing 2007 Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Lingustics(ACL)
• A. Edmonds, R.W. White, D. Morris, S.M. Drucker. Instrumenting the Dynamic Web 2007 Journal of Web Engineering 243--260
• G. Marchionini, R.W. White. Find What You Need, Understand What You Find 2007 International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 205-237
• R.W. White, G. Marchionini. Examining the Effectiveness of Real-Time Query Expansion 2007 Information Processing and Management 685-704
• R.W. White, S.M. Drucker. Investigating the Querying and Browsing Behavior of Advanced Search Engine Users 2007 Proceedings of SIGIR
• C.L.A. Clarke, E. Agichtein, S. Dumais, R.W. White. The Influence of Caption Features on Clickthrough Patterns in Web Search 2007 Proceedings of SIGIR
• R.W. White, S.M. Drucker. Investigating Behavioral Variability in Web Search 2007 Proceedings of the 16th International World Wide Web Conference(WWW)
• R.W. White, S.M. Drucker, G. Marchionini, M. Hearst, mc schraefel. Exploratory Search and HCI: Designing and Evaluating Interfaces to Support Exploratory Search Interaction 2007 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems(CHI)
• M. Melucci, R.W. White. Utilizing a Geometry of Context For Enhanced Implicit Feedback 2007 Proceedings of the 16th Annual ACM CIKM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM)
• M. Melucci, R.W. White. Discovering Hidden Contextual Factors for Implicit Feedback 2007 Workshop on Contextual Information Retrieval (part of the 6th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context)
• M. Richardson, E. Dominowska, R. Ragno. Predicting Clicks: Estimating the Click-Through Rate for New Ads 2007 Proceedings of the 16th International World Wide Web Conference(WWW-2007)
• Jacob R. Lorch, Atul Adya, William J. Bolosky, Ronnie Chaiken, John R. Douceur, Jon Howell. The SMART way to migrate replicated stateful services April 2006 Leuven, Belgium Proceedings of the 2006 EuroSys Conference 103--115
• Ryen W. White, Diane Kelly. A study on the effects of personalization and task information on implicit feedback performance November 2006 New York, NY, USA CIKM '06: Proceedings of the 15th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management 297--306
• M Taylor, H Zaragoza, N Craswell, S Robertson, C Burges. Optimisation methods for ranking functions with multiple parameters 2006 New York CIKM 2006: Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management 585--593
• I. Matveeva, C.J.C. Burges, T. Burkard, A. Laucius, L. Wong. High accuracy retrieval with multiple nested rankers 2006 Proceedings of SIGIR
• G. Andrew. A hybrid Markov/semi-Markov conditional random field for sequence segmentation 2006 Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing(EMNLP)
• M. Bilenko, B. Kamath, R.J. Mooney. Adaptive Blocking: Learning to Scale Up Record Linkage and Clustering 2006 Proceedings of the 6th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM-2006)
• M. Richardson, A. Prakash, E. Brill. Beyond PageRank: Machine Learning for Static Ranking 2006 Proceedings of the 15th International World Wide Web Conference(WWW-2006)
• C. Konig, E. Brill. Reducing the human overhead in text categorization 2006 Proceedings of KDD 2006
• S. Vassilvitskii, E. Brill. Using Web-Graph Distance for Relevance Feedback in Web Search 2006 Proceedings of SIGIR 2006
• E. Agichtein, E. Brill, S. Dumais. Improving Web Search Ranking by Incorporating User Behavior 2006 Proceedings of SIGIR 2006
• E. Agichtein, E. Brill, S. Dumais, R. Ragno. Learning User Interaction Models for Predicting Web Search Result Preferences 2006 Proceedings of SIGIR 2006
• C.J.C. Burges. Geometric Methods for Feature Selection and Dimensional Reduction 2005, to appear Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Handbook: A Complete Guide for Practitioners and Researchers L. Rokach and O. Maimon
• C.J.C. Burges, D. Plastina, J.C. Platt, E. Renshaw, H. Malvar. Using Audio Fingerprinting for Duplicate Detection and Audio Thumbnail Generation 2005, to appear Proc. IEEE Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
• E. Agichtein, S Cucerzan, E. Brill. Analysis of Factoid Questions for Effective Relation Extraction 2005 Proceedings of SIGIR 2005
• R. Soricut, E. Brill. Automatic Question Answering Using the Web: Beyond the Factoid 2005 Journal of Information Retrieval - Special Issue on Web Information Retrieval
• R. Soricut, E. Brill. A Unified Framework for Automatic Evaluation using N-gram Co-Occurrence Statistics 2004 Proceedings of ACL 2004
• R. Soricut, E. Brill. Automatic Question-Answering: Beyond the Factoid 2004 Proceedings of HLT 2004
• W. Xi, J. Lind, E. Brill. Learning Effective Ranking Functions for Newsgroup Search 2004 Proceedings of SIGIR 2004
• S. Cucerzan, E. Brill. Spelling correction as an iterative process that exploits the collective knowledge of web users 2004 Proceedings of EMNLP 2004 293-300
• R. Chandrasekar, H. Chen, S. Cortson-Oliver, E. Brill. Subwebs for Specialized Search 2004 Proceedings of SIGIR 2004
• H. Daume, E. Brill. Web Search Intent Induction via Automatic Query Reformulation 2004 Proceedings of HLT 2004
• C.J.C. Burges. Some Notes on Applied Mathematics for Machine Learning 2004 Advanced Lectures on Machine Learning O. Bousquet and U. von Luxburg and G. Rätsch 21--40
• D. Azari, E. Horvitz, S. Dumais, E. Brill. Web-based question answering: A decision making perspective 2003 Proceedings of UAI 2003
• S. Cucerzan, D. Yarowsky. Minimally Supervised Induction of Grammatical Gender 2003 Proceedings of HLT-NAACL 2003: Main Conference 40-47
• Matthew Richardson, Pedro Domingos. Building Large Knowledge Bases by Mass Collaboration 2003 Sanibel Island, FL Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Knowledge Capture 129-137
• M. Richardson, P. Domingos. Learning with Knowledge from Multiple Experts 2003 Washington, DC Proceedings of the Twentieth International Conference on Machine Learning 624-631
• Matthew Richardson, Rakesh Agrawal, Pedro Domingos. Trust Management for the Semantic Web 2003 Sanibel Island, FL Proceedings of the Second International Semantic Web Conference 351--368
• C.J.C. Burges, J.C. Platt, S. Jana. Distortion Discriminant Analysis for Audio Fingerprinting 2003 IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing 3 165--174 11
• C.J.C. Burges, D. Crisp. Uniqueness Theorems for Kernel Methods 2003 Neurocomputing 1-2 187--220 55
• E. Brill, S. Dumais, M. Banko. An Analysis of the AskMSR Question-Answering System 2002 Proceedings of EMNLP 2002
• S. Dumais, M. Banko, E. Brill, J. Lin, A. Ng. Web question answering: Is more always better? 2002 Proceedings of SIGIR 2002
• S. Cucerzan, D. Yarowsky. Augmented Mixture Models for Lexical Disambiguation 2002 Proceedings of EMNLP-2002 33-40
• S. Cucerzan, D. Yarowsky. Bootstrapping a Multilingual Part-of-speech Tagger in One Person-day 2002 Proceedings of CoNLL 2002 132-138
• S. Cucerzan, D. Yarowsky. Language Independent NER using a Unified Model of Internal and Contextual Evidence 2002 Proceedings of CoNLL 2002 171-175
• Matthew Richardson, Pedro Domingos. The Intelligent Surfer: Probabilistic Combination of Link and Content Information in PageRank 2002 Cambridge, MA Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14 T. G. Dietterich and S. Becker and Z. Ghahramani 1441-1448
• Matthew Richardson, Pedro Domingos. Mining Knowledge-Sharing Sites for Viral Marketing 2002 Edmonton, Canada Proceedings of the Eighth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 61-70
• C.J.C. Burges, J.C. Platt, S. Jana. Extracting Noise-Robust Features from Audio Data 2002 Proc. IEEE Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing 1021--1024
• C.J.C. Burges. Factoring as Optimization 2002 Microsoft Research MSR-TR-2002-83
• Atul Adya, William J. Bolosky, Miguel Castro, Gerald Cermak, Ronnie Chaiken, John R. Douceur, Jon Howell, Jacob R. Lorch, Marvin Theimer, Roger P. Wattenhofer. FARSITE: Federated, available, and reliable storage for an incompletely trusted environment Dec. 2002 Boston, MA Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI) 1--14
• E. Brill, J. Lin, M. Banko, S. Dumais, A. Ng. Data-intensive question answering 2001 Proceedings of TREC 2001
• E. Brill, G. Kacmarcik, C. Brockett. Learning to Extract Katakana-English Word Pairs from Non-Aligned Web Queries Using a Noisy-Channel Model of Back-Transliteration 2001 Proceedings of NLPRS 2001
• M. Banko, E. Brill. Mitigating the Paucity-of-Data Problem: Exploring the Effect of Training Corpus Size on Classifier Performance for Natural Language Processing 2001 Proceedings of HLT 2001
• M. Banko, E. Brill. Scaling to Very Very Large Corpora for Natural Language Disambiguation 2001 Proceedings of ACL 2001
• Pedro Domingos, Matthew Richardson. Mining the Network Value of Customers 2001 San Francisco, CA Proceedings of the Seventh ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 57-66
• E. Brill, R. C. Moore. An Improved Error Model for Noisy Channel Spelling Correction 2000 Proceedings of ACL 2000
• E. Brill. Pattern-Based Disambiguation for Natural Language Processing 2000 Proceedings of EMNLP/VLC 2000
• D.J. Crisp, C.J.C. Burges. A Geometric Interpretation of $\nu$-SVM Classifiers 2000 NIPS 244-250 12
• C.J.C. Burges, D.J. Crisp. Uniqueness of the SVM Solution 2000 NIPS 223-229 12
• C.J.C. Burges. Geometry and Invariance in Kernel Based Methods 1999 Advances in Kernel Methods: Support Vector Learning B. Schölkopf and C.J.C. Burges and A.J. Smola 89--116
• C.J.C. Burges. A Tutorial on Support Vector Machines for Pattern Recognition 1998 Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 2 121-167 2
• C. J. C. Burges, B. Schölkopf. Improving the accuracy and speed of support vector learning machines 1997 Cambridge, MA Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 9 M. Mozer and M. Jordan and T. Petsche 375-381
• C.J.C. Burges. Simplified Support Vector Decision Rules 1996 Bari, Italy Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Machine Learning Lorenza Saitta 71-77
• C.J.C. Burges, O. Matan, Y. Le Cun, J.S. Denker, L.D. Jackel, C.E. Stenard, C.R. Nohl, J.I. Ben. Shortest Path Segmentation: A Method For Training a Neural Network to Recognize Character Strings 1992 IJCNN Conference Proceedings 165--172 3