Report on SIGIR 2004 Doctoral Consortium
David J Harper
Smart Web Technologies Centre
The Robert Gordon University
St Andrew Street, Aberdeen AB25 1HG, UK(email: david.harper@smartweb.rgu.ac.uk)
The Doctoral Consortium was run for the first time as part of the SIGIR 2004 inSheffield. The purpose of the Consortium is to give Doctoral students a forum, inwhich to discuss their proposed PhD research with experienced IR researchers andother Doctoral students. An important motivation in establishing this Consortium wasto enrich the level of interaction between students and experienced IR researchers,
and especially for those students from developing research groups. The Consortium
also provides an opportunity for students to establish a supportive community of other
Doctoral students at the same stage as themselves.
Student participation was based on a submitted paper, which was reviewed by theConsortium Program Committee (CPC). In this first year of operation, we received 13submissions, of which 9 were accepted. Student participants study in four countries,
and present a broad range of perspectives on our field, and this portends well for thefuture of IR. The Committee comprised a cross-section of experienced IR researchers,
who also cover a broad spectrum of research in the field.
The event took place on the Tutorials Day of the Conference. The format of the day
was: short presentations of the papers with discussion in plenary session; detailed
discussion between each student and two members of the CPC; and social interaction
over lunch and dinner. In the post-event feedback, the student participants said how
useful it was to have the undivided attention of two experts in the one-on-two sessions.
And, everyone enjoyed the excellent curry available in Sheffield.
The process for submitting, selecting and publishing Consortium papers was as follows.
Prospective student attendees submitted a four page technical paper, together with a one
page “case for attending” prepared by the student and his/her advisor. Each submission
was reviewed by two CPC members, based on technical considerations, and on theperceived benefit of attendance. Abstracts of the accepted papers are included in a
fuller report published in the SIGIR Conference Proceedings. In addition, students
were encouraged to submit poster or full paper versions of their Consortium papers tothe main SIGIR Conference, and some students took advantage of this opportunity forwider dissemination of their work.

The student participants and paper titles were (full abstracts can be found in the SIGIR
2004 Conference Proceedings):
Razvan Stefan Bot
Department of Information Systems
New Jersey Institute of Technology

Bicheng Liu
School of Computing
The Robert Gordon University

Improving Document Representation Supporting Federated Information
by Accumulating Relevance Feedback: Sharing Communities
The Relevance Feedback Accumulation
algorithm
Jochen L. Leidner
School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh

Melanie Gnasa
Institute of Computer Science III
University of Bonn

Toponym Resolution in Text: “Which Sharing Knowledge Online:
a Dream or Reality?
Sheffield is it?”
Melanie J. Martin
Department of Computer Science
New Mexico State University

Andrew Trotman
Department of Computer Science
University of Otago

Reliability and Verification of Natural
Language Text on the World Wide Web
Paul Ogilvie
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

An Artificial Intelligence Approach toInformation Retrieval
Yixing Sun
School of Computing
The Robert Gordon University

Understanding Combination ofDiscovering and Representing
Evidence using Generative Probabilistic the Contextual and Narrative Structure
Models for Information Retrievalof E-books to Support Readingand Comprehension
Xiaojun Yuan
School of Communication
Information and Library Studies
Rutgers, The State University of New
JerseySupporting Multiple InformationSeeking Strategies in a Single SystemFramework
Financial support for student travel, and registration for both the Consortium andConference, was generously provided by the SIGIR Conference Chair using funding
obtained from the European Commission FP6 Marie Curie Actions Programme, andfrom ACM SIGIR through the Executive. We would also like to thank the SIGIR
Executive for encouraging us in the development of the Doctoral Consortium, withparticular thanks to the SIGIR Chairs, Susan Dumais (immediate past Chair) and Jamie
Callan (current Chair). Sponsorship was also provided by the BCS Information
Retrieval Specialist Group. We also like to thank Kluwer Academics for supporting the“Doctoral Consortium Award”. The joint recipients of this award, based on theindividual paper and contribution during the Consortium, were Jochen Leidner(University of Edinburgh) and Paul Oglivie (Carnegie Mellon University)
We are sure that the Doctoral Consortium will become a permanent fixture within theannual SIGIR Conference, and that it will contribute to the development of new
researchers in the field, and hence to the growth of the international IR community.
The Doctoral Consortium will be offered as part of the SIGIR 2005 Conference inBrazil, and we are hoping for many more submissions.
As Chair, I would like to express my profound thanks to the members of theConsortium Programme Committee for their efforts in reviewing both papers andabstracts, and for participating in the Consortium. They are:Nick Belkin, Rutgers U., USA
Bruce Croft, U. Massachusetts, USA
Sue Dumais, Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA
Liz Liddy, Syracuse U., USAYoëlle Maarek, IBM Research, Israel
Alistair Moffat, U. Melbourne, Australia
Doug Oard, U. Maryland, USA
Keith van Rijsbergen, U. Glasgow, UK
Steve Robertson, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UKJohn Tait, U. Sunderland, UK