Alexandria @ SIGIR 2014

The ALEXANDRIA project team participated in the 37th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR’2014) in Gold Coast, Australia in July 2014. We contribute in one full paper and two short papers for the main conference, two full papers for the workshops, and a demo paper. The list of our publications at SIGIR’2014 are as follows:

Full paper

• Xiaofei Zhu, Wolfgang Nejdl and Mihai Georgescu. “An Adaptive Teleportation Random Walk Model for Learning Social Tag Relevance”

Social tags are known to be a valuable source of information for image retrieval and organization. However, contrary to the conventional document retrieval, rich tag frequency information in social sharing systems, such as Flickr, is not available, thus we cannot directly use the tag frequency (analogous to the term frequency in a document) to represent the relevance of tags. Many heuristic approaches have been proposed to address this problem, among which the well-known neighbor voting based approaches are the most effective methods. The basic assumption of these methods is that a tag is considered as relevant to the visual content of a target image if this tag is also used to annotate the visual neighbor images of the target image by lots of different users. The main limitation of these approaches is that they treat the voting power of each neighbor image either equally or simply based on its visual similarity. In this paper, we cast the social tag relevance learning problem as an adaptive teleportation random walk process on the voting graph. In particular, we model the relationships among images by constructing a voting graph, and then propose an adaptive teleportation random walk, in which a confidence factor is introduced to control the teleportation probability, on the voting graph. Through this process, direct and indirect relationships among images can be explored to cooperatively estimate the tag relevance. To quantify the performance of our approach, we compare it with state-of-the-art methods on two publicly available datasets (NUS-WIDE and MIR Flickr). The results indicate that our method achieves substantial performance gains on these datasets.

Short Papers

• Andrea Ceroni, Nam Khanh Tran, Nattiya Kanhabua and Claudia Niederée. “Bridging Temporal Context Gaps using Time-Aware Re-Contextualization”
• Dimitrios Kotsakos, Theodoros Lappas, Dimitrios Kotzias, Dimitrios Gunopulos, Nattiya Kanhabua and Kjetil Nørvåg. “A Burstiness-aware Approach for Document Dating”

Workshop Papers

• Nattiya Kanhabua and Wolfgang Nejdl. “On the Value of Temporal Anchor Texts in Wikipedia” In SIGIR’ 2014 Workshop on Temporal, Social and Spatially-aware Information Access (#TAIA2014)
• Sergej Zerr, Odysseas Papapetrou and Elena Demidova. “HEALTH+Z: Confidential Provider Selection in Collaborative Healthcare P2P Networks” In SIGIR’2014 Privacy-Preserving IR (PIR) Workshop

Demo Papers

• Stefan Siersdorfer, Sergej Zerr, Jose San Pedro and Jonathon Hare. “NicePic!: A System for Extracting Attractive Photos from Flickr Streams”