I did have a couple of good talks with people giving posters, it’s true. Perhaps you’re right — poster-based presentation is a better way of handling high-volume conferences than squeezing paper lengths. At this year’s CIKM, the posters were poorly run — about the only poor aspect of the conference. They were in a room that many people were unaware of, and they were so crowded together, facing each other in rows, that it was very difficult to squash in to see them. That though is an organizational issue. The larger problem is the status one. Do posters count as publications? And how many people will be willing to travel to conferences just to present a poster?

Hi! I had no choice: none of my co-authors were available to go to the conference!

I like your paper by the way,
now I’m in Japan but it’s still with me.

I feel a bit guilty for not having taken notes on the tutorial, but I suspect that for people with an information extraction background any notes I would have taken would have been pretty unsatisfactory. Very basically, Marius was looking at ways of identifying entities and is-a relationships between entities in free text. So you start off with your seed entities, then you find contexts in which those seed entities are used, then you find other terms or phrases that are used in the same
context, and connect those new phrases to the class of your existing ones. Well, that’s the basic area; of course, all the methods he discussed were more advanced than that.

One idea that he raised (based on his own earlier work) is that you can do this sort of extraction not just on text document collections, but on query logs, too. For instance, if your class is “Drug”, and your seed instances are “viagra, xanax, vioxx”, then you find queries like “side effects of viagra”, “side effects of xanax”, etc., from which you generalise the pattern “sides effects of X’. Then, from that, you can find other instances, e.g. “sides effects of lipitor”, and so forth. I guess a kind of obvious idea when discussed, but when Marius said in his outline that entity extraction could also be done on queries alone, alot of people (myself included) expressed surprise.

I wonder whether Marius will put his slides up on the web? They’re pretty easy to follow as a standalone resource.

William

Yes, this huge volume of quickly-delivered papers is not a great experience. It is almost a reduction to absurdity. I doubt that many people have the mental stamina to still be alert for the last two papers of a five-paper session. I’ll blog some more about my overall feelings about the process once the conference is over.

Switching from papers to posters is a good idea in principle, but in practice my impression is that people just aren’t that interested in reading posters. Certainly the poster session at this year’s CIKM seems poorly attended, but that may in part be because they’re running them simultaneously with the paper sessions and have them squashed into a small room.

Meanwhile, people, don’t forget to post your slides and papers online. Chances are that the people who will use your work are either not at the conference, or else, they are jet-lagged, sleepy or otherwise preoccupied. Want to have more impact? Maximize the availability of your content.