Guido Zuccon

In October 2011 I moved to the Australian e-Health Research Centre, CSIRO (Brisbane, Australia). I am a PhD student at the Information Retrieval research group within the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, under the supervision of Professor Keith van Rijsbergen and Dr. Leif Azzopardi. I graduated at University of Padua (Italy) with "summa cum laude" in Information Engineering, defending a thesis on Logical Imaging formalised in a Quantum Theory framework. I am funded by the EPSRC Renaissance project, which focuses on modelling Information Retrieval (IR) processes using the formalism of Quantum Theory. My research interests are information retrieval, quantum probability theory, quantum-inspired models for information retrieval, interdependent document relevance, novelty&diversity retrieval. Contact: guido at dcs.gla.ac.uk List of publications

Research

• The Quantum Probability Ranking Principle
  This is the topic of my PhD thesis, where I formalise a new document ranking principle, the quantum probability ranking principle (QPRP), as opposed to the "classical" PRP. While the PRP is the optimal ranking principle for scenarios like the ad-hoc TREC track, where document's relevance is considered independently by the relevance of other documents, the QPRP provides the theoretical framework for strategies that aim to cope with interdependent document relevance. This is the case in subtopic retrieval (a.k.a. novelty&diversity). The QPRP does not only serve as principle on which novelty&diversity approaches are built on, like the one inspired by Portfolio Theory (see this paper in SIGIR2010). Conversely, it does suggest how interdependent document relevance should be considered when ranking: through the "interference" term.

  The proposal of the QPRP generated a series of correlated research questions. Among those, the one I am actually investigating are: 1) investigation of interference estimators, 2) the meaning (and role) of complex numbers in IR.

• Promoting diversity in document ranking
  My interest in subtopic/diversity retrieval originated from the work I have done on the QPRP. Indeed, QPRP addresses the issue of interdependent document relevance, which in turns embraces subtopic retrieval. I have participated to the ImageCLEF 2009 Photo Retrieval task, which aimed at comparing systems that promote diversity on an image collection (joint work with Teerapong "Kim" Leelanupab, and others). I am planning to participate to TREC2010 Web track.

• Distances between (semantic) subspaces
  In this work I define a measure aimed to establish relations between two or more semantic spaces, or more in general subspaces. Along with the proposed measure, I suggest to represent documents using subspaces, in contrast with the IR habit of using a vector to represent a document.
• Quantum inspired formalisation of Logical Imaging
  This has been the topic of my master thesis (graduated at University of Padua, in October 2007 with summa cum laude). Logical Imaging under the quantum view has also been presented here. I have also empirically re-visited the logical imaging technique, executing a number of experiment on TREC test collections, and pointing out how there is a flaw in its actual formulation (look here).
  

Publications

• "Top-k Retrieval using Facility Location Analysis"; by G. Zuccon, L. Azzopardi, D. Zhang, J> Wang; (to appear) in ECIR 2012 (21% acceptance rate)
• "Indexing without Spam"; by G. Zuccon, A. Nguyen, T. Leelanupab, L. Azzopardi; in ADCS 2011
• "The Interactive PRP for Diversifying Document Rankings"; by G. Zuccon, L. Azzopardi, C.J. van Rijsbergen; in SIGIR 2011 (32.5% acceptance rate)
• "An Analysis of Ranking Principles and Retrieval Strategies"; by G. Zuccon, L. Azzopardi, C.J. van Rijsbergen; in ICTIR 2011
• "On the use of Complex Numbers in Quantum Models for Information Retrieval"; by G. Zuccon, B. Piwowarski, L. Azzopardi; in ICTIR 2011
• "Back to the Roots: Mean-Variance Analysis of Relevance Estimations"; by G. Zuccon, L. Azzopardi, C.J. van Rijsbergen; in ECIR 2011 (32% acceptance rate)
• "Crowdsourcing Interactions: Capturing query sessions through crowdsourcing", by G. Zuccon, T. Leelanupab, S. Whiting, E. Yilmaz, J. M. Jose, and L. Azzopardi; in ECIR Workshop on Information Retrieval over Sessions, SIR 2011.
• "Crowdsourcing Interactions: A proposal for capturing user interactions through crowdsourcing"; by G. Zuccon, T. Leelanupab, S. Whiting, J. M. Jose, L. Azzopardi; in CSDM 2011 (collocated with WSDM 2011)
• "Investigating Subspace Distances in Semantic Spaces"; by G. Zuccon, L. Azzopardi, E. Gasco; in IIR 2011
• "Has Portfolio Theory got any Principles?"; by G. Zuccon, L. Azzopardi, C.J. van Rijsbergen; in SIGIR 2010 (32% acceptance rate)
• "Estimating Interference in the QPRP for Subtopic Retrieval"; by G. Zuccon, L. Azzopardi, C. Hauff, C.J. van Rijsbergen;in SIGIR 2010 (32% acceptance rate)
• "Using the Quantum Probability Ranking Principle to Rank Interdependent Documents", by G. Zuccon, L. Azzopardi; in ECIR 2010 (22% acceptance rate)
• "Developing the Quantum Probability Ranking Principle to Rank Interdependent Documents", by G. Zuccon, L. Azzopardi; in IIR 2010
• "The Quantum Probability Ranking Principle for Information Retrieval", by G. Zuccon, L. Azzopardi, C.J. van Rijsbergen; in ICTIR 2009 (21% acceptance rate)
• "Revisiting Logical Imaging for Information Retrieval", by G. Zuccon, L. Azzopardi, C.J. van Rijsbergen; in SIGIR 2009 (34% acceptance rate)
• "An Analogy between the Double Slit Experiment and Document Ranking", by G. Zuccon; in FDIA 2009 (collocated with ESSIR 2009)
• "The University of Glasgow at ImageCLEFPhoto 2009", by G. Zuccon, T. Leelanupab, A. Goyal, M. Halvey, P. Punitha, J. M. Jose; working notes of ImageCLEF 2009 (collocated with ECDL 2009)
• "Semantic Spaces: Measuring the Distance between Different Subspaces", by G. Zuccon, L. Azzopardi, C.J. van Rijsbergen; in QI 2009
• "A Formalization of Logical Imaging for Information Retrieval using Quantum Theory", by G. Zuccon, L. Azzopardi, C.J. van Rijsbergen; in TIR 2008

• "University of Glasgow (qirdcsuog) at TREC Crowdsourcing 2011: TurkRank - Network-based Worker Ranking in Crowdsourcing"; by S. Whiting, J. Rodriguez Perez, G. Zuccon, T. Leelanupab, and J.M. Josee; in TREC 2011. 
• "A Query-Basis Approach to Parametrizing Novelty-Biased Cumulative Gain"; by T. Leelanupab, G. Zuccon and J.M. Jose; in ICTIR 2011. 
• "Using Emotion to Diversify Document Rankings"; by Y. Moshfeghi, G. Zuccon and J.M. Jose; (to appear) in ICTIR 2011. 
• "When Two is Better than One: A Study of Ranking Paradigms and Their Integrations for Subtopic Retrieval"; by T. Leelanupab, G. Zuccon and J.M. Jose; in AIRS 2010 (28% acceptance rate). 
• "Social tagging, guppy effect, and the role of interference"; by R. Franco, G. Zuccon; in ECCS'10 Satellite Meeting, Modelling the Non-Separability of a Very Complex World (2010) 
• "How Quantum Theory is Developing the Field of Information Retrieval"; by D. Song, M. Lalmas, C.J. van Rijsbergen, I. Frommholz, B. Piwowarski, J. Wang, P. Zhang, G. Zuccon, P.D. Bruza, et al; in Quantum Interaction - QI 2010. 
• "Revisiting Subtopic Retrieval in the ImageCLEF 2009 Photo Retrieval Task"; by T. Leelanupab, G. Zuccon, J.M. Jose; in ImageCLEF, The Information Retrieval Series, (H. Muller et al. Eds.), vol. 32, pages 277-294 (2010). 
• "A Study of Ranking Paradigms and Their Integrations for Subtopic Retrieval"; by T. Leelanupab, G. Zuccon, J.M. Jose; Technical Report (2010) 

Research Activities

• CIKM 2011 (poster)
• ICTIR 2011
• SIGIR 2011 (poster)
• CIKM 2010 (additional reviewer)
• KDD 2010 (additional reviewer)
• Special issue of JIR - extended ICTIR 2009 papers
• ICTIR 2009
• TIR 2008, TIR 2009, TIR 2010, TIR 2011

I have attended the following events/conferences:

• ECIR 2011, Dublin, Ireland
• WSDM 2011, Hong Kong
• IIR 2011, Milan
• ECIR 2010, Milton Keynes, UK
• IIR 2010, Padua, Italy
• ICTIR 2009, Cambridge, UK
• FDIA 2009, Padua, Italy
• ESSIR 2009, Padua, Italy
• SIGIR 2009, Boston, USA
• QI 2009, Saarbruken, Germany
• IRFS 2008, Vienna, Austria
• TIR 2008, Turin, Italy
• QI 2008, Oxford, UK
• IRFS 2007, Vienna, Austria
• ESSIR 2007, Glasgow, UK
• ECIR 2007, Rome, Italy
• AIR 2006, Glasgow, UK
• SPIRE 2006, Glasgow, UK
• IRCDL 2006, Padua, Italy

• I have been tutoring at the Department of Computing Science for 3 years the following subjects: Algorithms and Data Structures 2, Object Oriented Software Engineer 2, Information Management 2

Research visits

• I visited Prof. Peter Bruza at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia, in August/October 2010. During my stay, I focus my research on semantic spaces and quantum interference. While in Australia, I also visited CSIRO (Canberra), University of Melbourne and RMIT, where I gave talks about the qPRP.
• I visited the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) of the Open University, investigating the geometry of semantic spaces (i.e. HAL). I had been supervised by Prof. Dawei Song (now at RGU); this collaboration led to the understanding of the geometrical behaviour of semantic spaces and the definition of a semantic subspace distance. You can have a look at my talk at KMi.

Talks&presentations

• Seminar@IR Glasgow, 22nd March 2010: pdf
• Renaissance project meetings: pdf1, pdf2, pdf3
• Presentation@IIR2010: pdf
• Presentation@ICTIR2009, 11th September 2009: pdf
• Presentation@QI2009, : pdf
• Seminar@KMi, 16th July 2008: pdf
• Presentation@TIR2008

Useful things

• information on TREC ad-hoc collections