Next week, we have the pleasure of having Prof. Oren Kurland give a talk in the colloquium.

The seminar will be held on Monday, March 4th at 14:00.

Location: C220.

The title, abstract and bio appear below.

Looking forward to seeing you,

Sagie and Liat

Competitive Search

The Web is a canonical example of a competitive search setting that includes document authors with ranking incentives: their goal is to promote their documents in rankings induced for queries. The incentives affect some of the corpus dynamics as the authors respond to rankings by applying strategic document manipulations. This reality has deep consequences that go well beyond the need to fight spam. We first show, using game theoretic analysis, that the probability ranking principle --- a fundamental principle underlying most retrieval methods ---- is not optimal in competitive retrieval settings; specifically, it leads to reduced topical diversity in the corpus. We then theoretically and empirically analyze the strategies of authors who strive to promote their documents in rankings. In addition, we present an approach for ranking-incentivized content manipulation. We then present novel retrieval methods that address strategic content manipulations.

This is joint work with Moshe Tennenholtz, Fiana Raiber, Ran Ben Basat, Gregory Goren, Haya Nachimovsky, Nimrod Raifer and Ziv Vasilisky

Bio:

Prof. Oren Kurland is the Stephen and Sharon Seiden Chair at the Technion. He is a distinguished member of the ACM. Oren's research area is information retrieval. He was the founding chair of the steering committee of the ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR). He served as a program co-chair, area chair and senior program committee member for leading information retrieval conferences.