Oren Kurland

Senior lecturer, Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.
Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University, M.B.A. and B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University.

Teaching

  • Information retrieval. (Winter 2008-2010)
  • Advanced topics in information systems --- Information Retrieval. (Spring 2007)
  • Software engineering. (Winter 2007, Spring 2008-2009)

    Ph.D. students

  • Eyal Krikon
  • Anna Shtok

    • M.Sc. students

  • Michael Bendersky (Graduated in 2007 -> Ph.D. student at UMASS.)
    Thesis: "Passage language models in ad hoc document retrieval". (Technical report IE/IS-2007-04) pdf
  • Inna Gelfer Kalmanovich (Graduated in 2009.)
    Thesis: "Cluster-based relevance models".
  • Anna Khudyak Kozorovitsky
  • Lior Meister
  • Fiana Raiber
  • Natali Soskin
  • Mattan Winaver (co-advised with Carmel Domshlak; graduated in 2009.)
  • Liron Zighelnic

    • Professional activities

  • Conference program committees: ACL-COLING 2006, CIKM 2008, CIKM 2009 (vice chair for the IR track), SIGIR 2007-2010, IJCAI 2009, WWW 2009-2010, WSDM 2010, KDD 2010, ACL 2010
  • Workshop program committees: SIGIR 2009 "Information retrieval and advertising" workshop, SIGIR 2008 ``Information retrieval for advertising" workshop, SIGIR 2008 ``Beyond binary relevance: Preferences, diversity, and set-level judgments'' workshop, AAAI 2008 ``Wikipedia and artificial intelligence: An evolving synergy'' workshop.
  • Reviewer: ACM transactions on information systems journal, information retrieval journal, ACM transactions on speech and language processing journal, ACM transactions on asian language information processing journal, journal of information processing and management, journal of the american society for information science and technology, knowledge and information systems journal, cognitive science journal.

    • Publications

  • Utilizing passage-based language models for ad hoc document retrieval. Michael Bendersky and Oren Kurland. Journal of Information Retrieval. (This is a journal version of the ECIR '08 paper.) (To appear)
  • Utilizing inter-passage and inter-document similarities for re-ranking search results. Eyal Krikon, Oren Kurland and Michael Bendersky. In proceedings of CIKM 2009. (Short paper) pdf (To appear) (This version contains corrected performance numbers of the reference comparison InterPsgDoc, which in the proceedings version are higher.)
  • From "identical" to "similar": Fusing retrieved lists based on inter-document similarities. Anna Khudyak Kozorovitsky and Oren Kurland. In proceedings of the 2nd international conference on the theory of information retrieval (ICTIR) 2009. pdf (To appear).
  • Navigating in the dark: Modeling uncertainty in ad hoc retrieval using multiple relevance models. Natali Soskin, Oren Kurland, and Carmel Domshlak. In proceedings of the 2nd international conference on the theory of information retrieval (ICTIR) 2009. pdf (To appear).
  • Predicting query performance by query-drift estimation. Anna Shtok, Oren Kurland, and David Carmel. In proceedings of the 2nd international conference on the theory of information retrieval (ICTIR) 2009. (Short paper) pdf (To appear).
  • Cluster-based query expansion. Inna Gelfer Kalmanovich and Oren Kurland. In proceedings of SIGIR, pp 646--647, 2009. (Poster) pdf
  • Integrating clusters created offline with query-specific clusters for document retrieval. Lior Meister, Oren Kurland and Inna Gelfer Kalmanovich. In proceedings of SIGIR, pp 706--707, 2009. (Poster) pdf
  • Clusters, language models, and ad hoc information retrieval. Oren Kurland and Lillian Lee. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 27(3), 2009. (This is a journal version of the SIGIR '04 paper.)
  • Re-ranking search results using language models of query-specific clusters. Oren Kurland. Journal of Information Retrieval, 12(4), pp 437--460, 2009.
  • The opposite of smoothing: A language model approach to ranking query-specific document clusters. Oren Kurland. In proceedings of SIGIR, pp 171--178, 2008. pdf
  • A rank-aggregation approach to searching for optimal query-specific clusters. Oren Kurland and Carmel Domshlak. In proceedings of SIGIR, pp 547--554, 2008. pdf
  • Re-ranking search results using document-passage graphs. Michael Bendersky and Oren Kurland. In proceedings of SIGIR (Poster), pp 853--854, 2008. pdf
  • Query-drift prevention for robust query expansion. Liron Zighelnic and Oren Kurland. In proceedings of SIGIR (Poster), pp 85--86, 2008. pdf
  • Utilizing passage-based language models for document retrieval. Michael Bendersky and Oren Kurland. In proceedings of ECIR, pp 162--174, 2008. pdf
  • Towards robust query expansion: Model selection in the language modeling framework. Mattan Winaver, Oren Kurland and Carmel Domshlak. In proceedings of SIGIR (Poster), pp 729--730, 2007. pdf
  • Respect my authority! HITS without hyperlinks, utilizing cluster-based language models. Oren Kurland and Lillian Lee. In proceedings of SIGIR 2006, pp 83--90, 2006. pdf   (This version contains three minor edits with respect to the proceedings version.)
  • Better than the real thing ? Iterative pseudo-query processing using cluster-based language models. Oren Kurland, Lillian Lee and Carmel Domshlak. In proceedings of SIGIR, pp 19--26, 2005. pdf
  • PageRank without hyperlinks: Structural re-ranking using links induced by language models. Oren Kurland and Lillian Lee. In proceedings of SIGIR pp 306--313, 2005. pdf
  • Corpus Structure, Language Models, and Ad Hoc Information Retrieval. Oren Kurland and Lillian Lee. In proceedings of SIGIR, pp 194--201, 2004. pdf

    Technical reports

    Two are better than one! Re-ranking search results using an additional retrieved list. Lior Meister, Oren Kurland and Inna Gelfer Kalmanovich. Technical report IE/IS-2009-01. pdf

    Ph.D. thesis

    Inter-document similarities, language models, and ad hoc information retrieval. August 2006 pdf

    Contact Information

    308 Bloomfield Hall
    Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management
    Technion
    Haifa 32000, Israel
    Tel: 972-4-8294500 Fax: 972-4-8295688
    email: kurland at ie.technion.ac.il