Elif Aktolga

I am a graduating PhD student in the CIIR lab, working with Prof. James Allan. My thesis is about the bias-specific diversification of search results towards non-topical aspects such as opinions and time.

I am interested in solving real world problems in Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing. I have worked in question answering, passage retrieval, language modeling, sentiment analysis, sparse queries, personalization, outlier detection, and diversification.

Here is an information retrieval (IR) glossary for new IR students.

Internships

I spent the summer of 2011 at Yahoo! Search working with great researchers in the User Intent Analysis team.

I developed algorithms for the Misfit Mode in IBM Many Bills at the Visual Communication Lab of the IBM Watson Research Center during the summer of 2010. I am very happy to see my work go into production!

Publications

[8] Aktolga, E., and Allan, J. Sentiment Diversification With Different Biases, SIGIR 2013, to appear.

[7] Aktolga, E., Jain, A., and Velipasaoglu, E., Building Rich User Search Queries Profiles, UMAP 2013, pp. 254-266.

[6] Aktolga, E. and Allan, J., Reranking Search Results for Sparse Queries, CIKM 2011, pp. 173-183.

[5] Aktolga, E., Ros, I., Assogba, Y. and DiMicco, J., Many Bills: Visualizing the Anatomy of Congressional Legislation, Workshop on Scalable Integration of Analytics and Visualization, AAAI 2011, pp. 2-7.

[4] Aktolga, E., Ros, I. and Assogba, Y., Detecting Outlier Sections in US Congressional Legislation, SIGIR 2011, pp. 235-244.

[3] Aktolga, E., Allan, J. and Smith, D., Passage Reranking for Question Answering Using Syntactic Structures and Answer Types, ECIR 2011, pp. 617-628.

[2] Cartright, M., Aktolga, E. and Dalton, J., Characterizing the Subjectivity of Topics, SIGIR 2009, pp. 642-643.

[1] Aktolga, E., Cartright, M. and Allan, J., Cross-Document Cross-Lingual Coreference Retrieval, CIKM 2008, pp. 1359-1360.

Theses

1. Elif Aktolga. Pattern Matching Strategies for Peephole Optimisation. MRes Thesis, University of Sussex, UK, 2005. PDF, Slides
2. Elif Aktolga. A Java Planner for Blocksworld Problems. BSc Thesis, University of Osnabrueck, Germany, 2004. PDF