SIGIR best paper awards announced today

The SIGIR 2007 best paper awards were handed today at the SIGIR banquet. This year's best paper is written by Ryen White, Mikhail Bilenko, and Silviu Cucerzan: Studying the Use of Popular Destinations to Enhance Web Search Interaction. The best student paper is written by D. Sculley and Gabriel Wachman: Relaxed online Support Vector Machines for spam filtering.

White, Bilenko, and Cucerza present a novel Web search interaction feature which, for a given query, provides links to websites frequently visited by other users with similar information needs. These popular destinations complement traditional search results, allowing direct navigation to authoritative resources for the query topic.

In the best student paper, Sculley and Wachman developed a fast online Support Vector Machine variant called Relaxed Online SVMs. The method gives state of the art performance on spam classification, at greatly reduced computational cost.

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