SIGIR 2010 best papers

Ryen White and Jeff Huang received the best paper award at SIGIR 2010 for their paper “Assessing the Scenic Route: Measuring the Value of Search Trails in Web Logs”. They present a log-based study estimating the user value of trail following. They demonstrate significant value to users in following trails, especially for certain query types. The findings have implications for the design of search systems, including trail recommendation systems that display trails on search result pages.

The best student paper is written by Ioannis Arapakis, Konstantinos Athanasakos, and Joemon Jose: “A comparison of general vs. personalized affective models for the prediction of topical relevance”. They determined whether the behavioural differences of users have an impact on the models' ability to determine topical relevance, and if, by personalising them, accuracy can be improved.