Niranjan Balasubramanian

Graduate Student

Department of Computer Science
University of Massachusetts Amherst
niranjan at cs dot umass dot edu

Short Bio

I am a fifth year graduate student advised by Prof. James Allan at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR). Prior to joining CIIR, I was a software engineer at the Center For Natural Language Processing(CNLP) at Syracuse University. I completed my Masters degree in Computer Science at the University of Buffalo in 2003. You can find a detailed resume here.

News

  • Passed my defense.Yay!
  • June 2011 - I am going to be a post-doctoral researcher at the KnowItAll group in the UW CSE department.
  • Feb 2011 - Moved to Seattle. I will be a visiting graduate student at the University of Washington.
  • Jan 2011 - Our extended paper on Topic Pages has been accepted for publication in the IJSC journal.
  • Sept 2010 - Our baby girl Nila was born Sept 11, 2010.
  • July 2010 - Online Feature Selection for Information Retrieval invited contribution to Feature Generation and Selection for Information Retrieval workshop in SIGIR 2010.
  • June 2010 - Topic Pages: An Alternative to the Ten Blue Links paper accepted at ICSC 2010.
    • More

    Research Interests

    My broad research interests include information retrieval, information organization and machine learning for IR.

    Query-dependent Selection of Retrieval Alternatives

    Information retrieval systems often need to choose between alternatives in query representation, retrieval models, or model parameters. The main goal of my work is to enable rank-time evaluation of such alternatives for each query. To this end, I am interested in the development of a framework that estimates relative differences in effectiveness between result sets retrieved by different alternatives. Application of this framework provides substantial improvements for choosing reduced versions of long queries and shows promise for choosing between ranking algorithms [SIGIR 2010].

    Automatic Topic Pages

    As an alternative to the standard ten blue links for presenting search results, I explored automatically generating topic pages which present information on diverse aspects pertaining to the topic [CIKM 2009].

    Mobile Information Retrieval

    I am interested in understanding the impact of system constraints on information retrieval from mobile phones. For instance, energy consumption of network activity is a key constraint on mobile phones and has a direct impact on web search which is essentially an interactive network application [IMC 2009].

    Sentence Retrieval

    Idetifying sentences that contain overlapping information is useful for several natural language applications such as Text Reuse Detection, Multi-Document Summarization, and Novelty Detection. I explored retrieval of restatements as a sentence retrieval task, comparing statistical approaches [SIGIR 2007] and proposed effective syntactic query models in a language modeling framework [SPIRE 2009].

    Publications

    1. Balasubramanian, N. and Cucerzan, S., Beyond Ranked Lists in Web Search: Aggregating Web Content in Topic Pages.. In the International Journal of Semantic Computing. An extended version of the IEEE ICSC paper.
    2. Balasubramanian, N., and Cucerzan, S., Topic Pages: An Alternative to the Ten Blue Links. In the Proceedings of IEEE ICSC 2010.

    3. Balasubramanian, N., Kumaran, G., and Carvalho, V., Exploring Reductions for Long Web Queries. In the Proceedings of ACM SIGIR 2010.

    4. Balasubramanian, N., Kumaran, G., and Carvalho, V., Predicting Query Performance on the Web.. A poster paper in the Proceedings of ACM SIGIR 2010.

    5. Balasubramanian, N., and Allan, J., Learning to Select Rankers. A poster paper in the Proceedings of ACM SIGIR 2010.

    6. Balasubramanian, N., Bendersky, M., and Allan, J., Cost-Effective Combination of Multiple Rankers: Learning When Not To Query., A poster paper at NESCAI student colloquium.

    7. Balasubramanian, N., and Cucerzan, S., Automatic Generation of Topic Pages using Query-based Aspect Models, a short paper in the Proceedings of the ACM CIKM 2009.

    8. Balasubramanian, N., Balasubramanian, A., and Venkataramani, A., Energy Consumption in Mobile Phones: A Measurement Study and Implications for Network Applications.
      In the Proceedings of ACM IMC 2009. A revised version with minor corrections can be found here.

    9. Balasubramanian, N., Balasubramanian, A., and Venkataramani, A., Energy Consumption in Mobile Phones: Measurement, Design Implications, and Algorithms
      A technical report with detailed proofs for the IMC 2009 paper.

    10. Balasubramanian, N., Venkataramani, A. and Allan. J., Energy Aware Search from Mobile PhonesA CIIR Technical Report.

    11. Balasubramanian, N., and Allan, J., Syntactic Query Models for Restatement Retrieval. In the Proceedings of String Processing and Information Retrieval Symposium, Saariselka, Finland, SPIRE 2009.

    12. Balasubramanian, N., Allan, J. and Croft, W. B. , "A Comparison of Sentence Retrieval Techniques" a poster presentation at ACM SIGIR 2007.
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