PhD Student Di JIANG, Prof Kenneth LEUNG, and Prof Wilfred NG Won the Best Student Paper Runner-up in DASFAA 2013

The paper "Beyond Click Graph: Topic Modeling for Search Engine Query Log Analysis" by PhD student Di JIANG, Prof Kenneth LEUNG, and Prof Wilfred NG has been selected as the Best Student Paper Runner-up in Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA) 2013.

The paper proposes three probabilistic topic models, namely the Meta-word Model (MWM), the Term-URL Model (TUM), and the Clickthrough Model (CTM), to analyze search engine query log. MWM unifies the co-occurrence of query terms and URLs by the meta-word occurrence. TUM captures the characteristics of query terms and URLs separately. CTM captures the clicking behavior explicitly and models the ternary relation between search queries, query terms and URLs. The three proposed models are evaluated against several strong baselines on a real-life commercial search engine log, and they significantly improved performance with respect to different quantitative metrics and also in applications such as date prediction, community discovery, and URL annotation.

Prof Kenneth Leung and Prof Katsumi Tanaka from Kyoto University at the award presentation ceremony of DASFAA 2013 at Wuhan, China