Technical Program
Wednesday, September 12, 2001

9.00-10.00 Keynote Address

10.30-12.30 Parallel Paper Sessions (Wednesday Sept. 12)

Paper Session 7A: Meta-Search

Modeling Score Distributions for Combining the Outputs of Search Engines
R. Manmatha (University of Massachussetts), T. Rath (University of Massachussetts), and Fangfang Feng (University of Massachussetts)

Models for Metasearch
Javed Aslam (Dartmouth College) and Mark Montague (Dartmouth College)

The Score-Distributional Threshold Optimization for Adaptive Binary Classification Tasks
Avi Arampatzis (Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen) and Andre van Hameren (Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen)

Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Filtering Threshold
Yi Zhang (Carnegie Mellon University) and Jamie Callan (Carnegie Mellon University)

Paper Session 7B: Learning

A Meta-Learning Approach for Text Categorization
Wai Lam (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) and Kwok-Yin Lai (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Unsupervised and Supervised Clustering for Topic Tracking
Jeffrey McCarley (IBM TJ Watson Research Center), Martin Franz (IBM TJ Watson Research Center), Todd Ward (IBM TJ Watson Research Center), and Wei-Jing Zhu(IBM TJ Watson Research Center)

Intelligent Information Triage
Sofus Macskassy (Rutgers University), Haym Hirsh (Rutgers University), Foster Provost (NYU Stern School of Business), Ramesh Sankaranarayanan (NYU Stern School of Business), and Vasant Dhar (NYU Stern School of Business)

Discovering Information Flow Using a High Dimensional Conceptual Space
Dawei Song (The University of Queensland) and Peter Bruza (The University of Queensland)

12:30-3:00 ACM/SIGIR Meeting and Lunch (Wednesday Sept. 12)

3.00-4.30 Parallel Paper Sessions (Wednesday Sept. 12)

Paper Session 8A: Language Models 2

A Study of Smoothing Methods for Language Models Applied to ad hoc Information Retrieval
Chengxiang Zhai (Carnegie Mellon University) and John Lafferty (Carnegie Mellon University)

Topic Segmentation with an Aspect Hidden Markov Model
David Blei (U.C. Berkeley) and Pedro Moreno (Compaq Research)

Finding Topic Words for Hierarchical Summarization
Dawn Lawrie (University of Massachusetts), W. Bruce Croft (University of Massachusetts), and Arnold Rosenberg (University of Massachusetts)

Paper Session 8B: Question Answering

Exploiting Redundancy in Question Answering
Charles Clarke (University of Waterloo), Gordon V. Cormack (University of Waterloo), and Thomas R. Lynam (University of Waterloo)

High Performance Question Answering
Marius Pasca (Southern Methodist University) and Sanda Harabagiu (Southern Methodist University)

Searcher Performance in Question Answering
Ross Wilkinson (CSIRO, Melbourne), MingFang Wu (CSIRO, Melbourne), Michael Fuller (RMIT, Melbourne)