21st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on
Research and Development in Information Retrieval
Melbourne, Australia
August 24 - 28, 1998
TUTORIAL T5
Machine Learning for Information Retrieval
Presenter
David D. Lewis,
AT&T Labs.
Time
Monday 24 August, 2:00pm--5:30pm.
Location
Melbourne Town Hall, Swanston Street, Melbourne.
Description
This tutorial will discuss machine learning methods for IR tasks,
including retrieval, categorization, and routing/filtering. The
emphasis will be on supervised learning (i.e. learning from manually
classified examples), with some attention to unsupervised methods
(e.g. clustering, LSI) for representation change. The use of machine
learning in commercial IR software will be touched upon, but the
emphasis will be on research findings. The tutorial will attempt to
clarify the links between important but sometimes confusing concepts
from IR (e.g. term weighting, query expansion, relevance feedback,
classification, etc.) and important but sometimes confusing concepts
from machine learning (e.g. feature extraction, overfitting,
generalization, classification, etc.).
Audience
Intermediate level. Attendees with some prior exposure to IR will get
the most from the tutorial.
Biography of presenter
David D. Lewis is a Principal Research Staff Member at AT&T Labs.
Prior to that he was a research faculty member at the University of
Chicago, and did his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst. He has published extensively on the
application of machine learning and natural language processing to IR,
and has organized several workshops in these areas. He has been
heavily involved in the design of the TREC evaluations and the
construction of test collections for text categorization.
Cost
The charge for registration is $A150 per tutorial.
Registrants will receive a copy of the
notes for the tutorial, and morning/afternoon tea.
All tutorials are offered on an only-if-demand-warrants
basis;
and full refunds will be given for tutorials
that are cancelled because of low enrolments.
Tutorial notes will also be available for sale on an individual
basis at the conference registration desk.
sigir98@cs.mu.oz.au,
10 April 1998.