Yahoo!

About: Yahoo! is a company organization based out in London, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Web search query. The organization has 26749 authors who have published 29915 publications receiving 732583 citations. The organization is also known as: Yahoo! Inc. & Maudwen-Yahoo! Inc.

A reference collection for web spam

Abstract: We describe the WEBSPAM-UK2006 collection, a large set of Web pages that have been manually annotated with labels indicating if the hosts are include Web spam aspects or not. This is the first publicly available Web spam collection that includes page contents and links, and that has been labelled by a large and diverse set of judges.

Geographic variation in avian incubation periods and parental influences on embryonic temperature

Abstract: Theory predicts shorter embryonic periods in species with greater embryo mortality risk and smaller body size. Field studies of 80 passerine species on three continents yielded data that largely conflicted with theory; incubation (embryonic) periods were longer rather than shorter in smaller species, and egg (embryo) mortality risk explained some variation within regions, but did not explain larger differences in incubation periods among geographic regions. Incubation behavior of parents seems to explain these discrepancies. Bird embryos are effectively ectothermic and depend on warmth provided by parents sitting on the eggs to attain proper temperatures for development. Parents of smaller species, plus tropical and southern hemisphere species, commonly exhibited lower nest attentiveness (percent of time spent on the nest incubating) than larger and northern hemisphere species. Lower nest attentiveness produced cooler minimum and average embryonic temperatures that were correlated with longer incubation periods independent of nest predation risk or body size. We experimentally tested this correlation by swapping eggs of species with cool incubation temperatures with eggs of species with warm incubation temperatures and similar egg mass. Incubation periods changed (shortened or lengthened) as expected and verified the importance of egg temperature on development rate. Slower development resulting from cooler temperatures may simply be a cost imposed on embryos by parents and may not enhance offspring quality. At the same time, incubation periods of transferred eggs did not match host species and reflect intrinsic differences among species that may result from nest predation and other selection pressures. Thus, geographic variation in embryonic development may reflect more complex interactions than previously recognized.

Gradient descent optimization of smoothed information retrieval metrics

Abstract: Most ranking algorithms are based on the optimization of some loss functions, such as the pairwise loss. However, these loss functions are often different from the criteria that are adopted to measure the quality of the web page ranking results. To overcome this problem, we propose an algorithm which aims at directly optimizing popular measures such as the Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain and the Average Precision. The basic idea is to minimize a smooth approximation of these measures with gradient descent. Crucial to this kind of approach is the choice of the smoothing factor. We provide various theoretical analysis on that choice and propose an annealing algorithm to iteratively minimize a less and less smoothed approximation of the measure of interest. Results on the Letor benchmark datasets show that the proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performances.

Dear Sir or Madam, May I Introduce the GYAFC Dataset: Corpus, Benchmarks and Metrics for Formality Style Transfer

Abstract: Style transfer is the task of automatically transforming a piece of text in one particular style into another. A major barrier to progress in this field has been a lack of training and evaluation datasets, as well as benchmarks and automatic metrics. In this work, we create the largest corpus for a particular stylistic transfer (formality) and show that techniques from the machine translation community can serve as strong baselines for future work. We also discuss challenges of using automatic metrics.

Search systems and methods with integration of user annotations

Abstract: Computer systems and methods allow users to annotate content items found in a corpus such as the World Wide Web. Annotations, which can include any descriptive and/or evaluative metadata related to a document, are collected from a user and stored in association with that user. Users are able to annotate and view their annotations for any document they encounter while interacting with the corpus, including hits returned in a search of the corpus. Users are also able to search their annotations or to limit searches to documents they have annotated. Metadata from annotations can also be aggregated across users and aggregated metadata applied in generating search results.