Axiomatic Thinking in Neural IR: An axiomatic approach to diagnosing deep IR models

After surpassing human performance in the fields of Computer Vision, Speech Recognition and NLP, deep learning has been gaining scientific ground in IR. In spite of the sheer amount of publications that have proposed so-called neural IR approaches over the past decade, the field has not achieved the kind of progress seen in related fields. Over...

Enabling Human Computation through Text-based Conversational Agents

Human Computation (HC) has established itself to be a powerful tool for carrying out certain simple and repetitive tasks in the form of microtasks, which to this day are still difficult for a machine to automate. <br/>With the latest increase in interest in machine learning, HC has similarly gotten more attention as a popular way to acquire...

Sentiment Analysis: a comparison of feature sets for social data and reviews

Consumers share their experiences or opinion about products or brands in various channels nowadays, for example on review websites or social media. Sentiment analysis is used to predict the sentiment of text from consumers about these products or brands in order to understand the tone of customers towards these products or brands. This thesis...

Evaluating Collaborative Search for a Learning-Oriented Search Task

Web search has become a convenient option for seeking information related to learning, therefore understanding how to facilitate human learning through a search engine has the potential to improve the quality of informal education and online learning. One less understood aspect of search as learning is the effect of collaboration in a search...