Oren Kurland

Associate Professor, Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.
Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University.

Teaching

• Information retrieval. (Winter 2008-2013)
• Advanced topics in information systems --- Information retrieval. (Spring 2007)
• Software engineering. (Winter 2007, Spring 2008-2013)

Ph.D. students

Current

• Fiana Raiber
• Hadas Raviv
• Anna Shtok

Graduated

• Eyal Krikon
  Thesis: "Using document passages for information retrieval".

M.Sc. students

Current

• Shay Hummel
• Peter Izsak
• Adir Katz
• Savva Khalaman
• Gad Markovits
• Dima Pavlov
• Ofri Rom
• Mor Sondak

Graduated

• 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
• Olga Butman (Graduated in 2012.)
  Thesis: "New approaches for query-performance prediction".
• Anna Khudyak Kozorovitsky (Graduated in 2011.)
  Thesis: "Fusing retrieved lists based on inter-document similarities".
• Inna Gelfer Kalmanovich (Graduated in 2009.)
  Thesis: "Cluster-based relevance models".
• Lior Meister (Graduated in 2010.)
  Thesis: "Re-ranking search results using an additional retrieved list".
• Natali Soskin (Graduated in 2010.)
  Thesis: "Navigating in the dark: Modeling uncertainty in ad hoc retrieval using multiple relevance models".
• Mattan Winaver (co-advised with Carmel Domshlak; graduated in 2009.)
• Liron Zighelnic (Graduated in 2010.)
  Thsis: "Robust query expansion based on query-drift prevention".

Professional activities

• Editorial boards: Journal of Information Retrieval, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR)
• Co-chair for the doctoral consortium of WSDM 2014.
• Program co-chair for the 4th International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR), 2013.
• Program co-chair for the 20th International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE), 2013.
• Senior program committee member/area chair: SIGIR 2011-2013, CIKM 2009-2013.
• Program committee member: SIGIR 2007-2013, WSDM 2010-2013, WWW 2009-2013, ACL 2013, NAACL-HLT 2013, KDD 2013, ECIR 2012-2013, OAIR 2013, AIRS 2012, EMNLP-CoNLL 2012, EACL 2012, IJCAI 2011, ACL-HLT 2011, KDD 2010, ACL 2010, NAACL-HLT 2010, EMNLP 2010.
• Reviewer: ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), Journal of Information Retrieval, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), Artificial Intelligence Journal, Journal of Information Processing and Management, IEEE Transcations on Knowledge and Data Engineering, ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing, ACM transactions on Asian Language Information Processing, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Knowledge and Information Systems Journal, Cognitive Science Journal.

Tutorials

• Donald Metzler and Oren Kurland. Experimental methods for information retrieval. SIGIR 2012. pdf
• David Carmel and Oren Kurland. Query performance prediction for IR. SIGIR 2012. pdf

Publications

• Ranking document clusters using markov random fields. Fiana Raiber and Oren Kurland. In proceedings of SIGIR, 2013. (To appear.)
• Using document-quality measures to predict Web-search effectiveness. Fiana Raiber and Oren Kurland. In proceedings of ECIR, pp 134--145, 2013. pdf
• The cluster hypothesis for entity oriented search. Hadas Raviv, Oren Kurland, David Carmel. In proceedings of SIGIR, 2013. (Short paper) (To appear.)
• Shame to be Sham: Addressing content-based grey hat search engine optimization. Fiana Raiber, Kevyn Collins-Thompson, Oren Kurland. In proceedings of SIGIR, 2013. (Short paper) (To appear.)
• Estimating query representativeness for query-performance prediction. Mor Sondak, Anna Shtok, Oren Kurland. In proceedings of SIGIR, 2013. (Short paper) (To appear.)
• Back to the Roots: A probabilistic framework for query-performance prediction. Oren Kurland, Anna Shtok, Shay Hummel, Fiana Raiber, David Carmel, Ofri Rom. In proceedings of CIKM, pp 823--832, 2012. pdf
• Predicting query performance for fusion-based retrieval. Gad Markovits, Anna Shtok, Oren Kurland, David Carmel. In proceedings of CIKM, pp 813--822, 2012. pdf
• Content-based relevance estimation on the Web using inter-document similarities. Fiana Raiber, Oren Kurland, Moshe Tennenholtz. In proceedings of CIKM, pp 1769-1773, 2012. (Short paper) pdf
• Query-performance prediction and cluster ranking: Two sides of the same coin. Oren Kurland, Fiana Raiber, Anna Shtok. In proceedings of CIKM, pp 2459--2462, 2012. (Poster) pdf
• Exploring the cluster hypothesis, and cluster-based retrieval, over the Web. Fiana Raiber and Oren Kurland. In proceedings of CIKM, pp 2507--2510, 2012. (Poster) pdf
• Predicting the performance of passage retrieval for question answering. Eyal Krikon, David Carmel, Oren Kurland. In proceedings of CIKM, pp 2451--2454, 2012. (Poster) pdf
• Predicting query performance by query-drift estimation. Anna Shtok, Oren Kurland, David Carmel, Fiana Raiber, Gad Markovits. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 30(2), 2012. (This is a journal version of the ICTIR '09 paper.)
• A ranking framework for entity oriented search using markov random fields. Hadas Raviv, David Carmel, Oren Kurland. 1st Joint International Workshop on Entity-oriented and Semantic Search (JIWES), SIGIR 2012. pdf
• Clarity re-visited. Shay Hummel, Anna Shtok, Fiana Raiber, Oren Kurland, David Carmel. In proceedings of SIGIR pp 1039--1040, 2012. (Poster) pdf
• Utilizing inter-document similarities in federated search. Savva Khalaman and Oren Kurland. In proceedings of SIGIR, pp 1169--1170, 2012. (Poster) pdf
• A unified framework for post-retrieval query-performance prediction. Oren Kurland, Anna Shtok, David Carmel, and Shay Hummel. In proceedings of the 3rd international conference on the theory of information retrieval (ICTIR), pp 15--26, 2011. pdf
• Cluster-based fusion of retrieved lists. Anna Khudyak Kozorovitsky and Oren Kurland. In proceedings of SIGIR, pp 893--902, 2011. pdf
• Utilizing minimal relevance feedback for ad hoc retrieval. Eyal Krikon and Oren Kurland. In proceedings of SIGIR, pp 1099--1100, 2011. (Poster) pdf
• From "identical" to "similar": Fusing retrieved lists based on inter-document similarities. Anna Khudyak Kozorovitsky and Oren Kurland. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 41, pp 267--296, 2011. (This is a journal version of the ICTIR '09 paper.)
• Re-ranking search results using an additional retrieved list. Lior Meister, Oren Kurland, Inna Gelfer Kalmanovich. Journal of Information Retrieval, 14(4), pp 413--437, 2011.
• The opposite of smoothing: A language model approach to ranking query-specific document clusters. Oren Kurland and Eyal Krikon. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 41, pp 367-- 395, 2011. (This is a journal version of the SIGIR '08 paper.)
• A study of the integration of passage, document, and cluster -based information for re-ranking search results. Eyal Krikon and Oren Kurland. Journal of Information Retrieval, 14(6), pp 593--616, 2011.
• On identifying representative relevant documents. Fiana Raiber and Oren Kurland. In proceedings of CIKM, pp 99-108, 2010. pdf
• Utilizing inter-passage and inter-document similarities for re-ranking search results. Eyal Krikon, Oren Kurland, Michael Bendersky. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 29(1), 2010. (This is a journal version of the CIKM '09 paper.)
• PageRank without hyperlinks: Structural re-ranking using links induced by language models. Oren Kurland and Lillian Lee. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 28(4), 2010. (This is a journal version of the SIGIR '05 paper.)
• Using statistical decision theory and relevance models for query-performance prediction. Anna Shtok, Oren Kurland, David Carmel. In proceedings of SIGIR, pp 259--266, 2010. pdf
• Utilizing passage-based language models for ad hoc document retrieval. Michael Bendersky and Oren Kurland. Journal of Information Retrieval, 13(2), pp 157--187, 2010. (This is a journal version of the ECIR '08 paper.)
• Utilizing inter-passage and inter-document similarities for re-ranking search results. Eyal Krikon, Oren Kurland and Michael Bendersky. In proceedings of CIKM (short paper), pp 1597--1600, 2009. pdf (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), pp 212--223, 2009. pdf
• 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), pp 79--91, 2009. pdf
• 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), pp 305--312, 2009. (Short paper) pdf
• 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