Leif Azzopardi :: School of Computing Science

Brief

Dr. Leif Azzopardi is currently an RCUK Research Fellow within the Glasgow Information Retrieval Group and a full time academic member of staff within the Department of Computing Science, at the University of Glasgow. His research interests include: distributed information retrieval models and systems, formal models, specifically probabilistic models such as the Language Model, or Convergence to Order Framework, and the Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems. More recently, he has began to apply the concept of “Accessibility” from Transportation Planning to the management and evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems.

Increasingly, Information Retrieval systems, such as web search engines, are becoming the primary means by which one accesses information. Therefore, it is important to consider how the retrieval system impacts upon ones ability to access information. For instance, a search engine may rank particular sites above others consistently such that a long term bias towards or against certain content or providers persists. Such a bias, may be characteristic of other media providers, like newspapers or television channels, where an editorial decision results in the choices presented during search. One line of research is to be able characterize the bias of search engines so that users can see the implicit influence of the search tool.

Research Interests

Other areas where considering accessibility is now imperative is within E-Government. With US Legislation now requiring E-Government content be made accessible through search technology. Alternatively, within the Legal domain, it is important that an attorney provides their client with the best legal advice and this is often dependent upon the information the attorney can source through the search system. Understanding the limits in terms of access to the information enables the selection of the most appropriate search tool. This is particularly important in the Patent domain, where missing one document could result in a multimillion dollar lawsuit because of a Patent infringement. If the search tool limits what can be accessed within the collection then there is an increased likelihood that these documents will never be encountered. The consequences of this are yet unexplored and present a range of interesting research questions.

See these publications for further details:

Retrievability: An Evaluation Measure for Higher Order Information Access Tasks
Azzopardi L. Vinay V. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference in Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2008), 2008
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Accessibility in Information Retrieval
Azzopardi L. Vinay V. BCS-IRSG European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2008), 2008
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Document Accessibility: Evaluating the access afforded to a document by the retrieval system
Azzopardi L. Vinay V. Evaluation Workshop at the European Conference in Information Retrieval, 2008

Search Engine Predilection towards News Media Providers
Azzopardi L. Owens C. Proceedings of the 32th Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2009), 2009

Latest Organization and Activities

Publications

--- 2011 ---
Fu-Funder: A Game for Studying Querying Behaviors - Test your Search-Fu
Carly O'neil, James Purvis and Leif Azzopardi, Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2011.

Finding Interest in Streams
Richard Glassey and Leif Azzopardi Proceedings of the 74 Annual Meeting of the Amercian Society for INformation Science and Technology, 2011.

On the use of Complex Numbers in Quantum Models for Information Retrieval
Guido Zuccon, Benjamin Piwowarski, Leif Azzopardi, ICTIR '11: Proceedings of the International Conference on Theory in Information Retrieval, 2011

Crowdsourcing Interactions: Capturing query sessions through crowdsourcing
G. Zuccon, T. Leelanupab, S. Whiting, E. Yilmaz, J. M. Jose, and L. Azzopardi, ECIR Workshop on Information Retrieval over Session, SIR 2011

Crowdsourcing Interactions: A proposal for capturing user interactions through crowdsourcing
G. Zuccon, T. Leelanupab, S.Whiting, J. M. Jose, L. Azzopardi; Proceedings of CSDM 2011 (collocated with WSDM 2011)

Towards a Living Lab for Information Retrieval Research and Development :A proposal for a living lab for product search tasks
Leif Azzopardi and Krisztian Balog, CLEF 2011: Conference on Multilingual and Multimodal Information Access Evaluation, September 2011

The Economics in Interactive Information Retrieval
Leif Azzopardi, SIGIR '11: Proceeding of the 34th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, 2011

The Interactive PRP for Diversifying Document Rankings
Guido Zuccon, Leif Azzopardi, SIGIR '11: Proceeding of the 34th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, 2011

JuSe: A Picture Dictionary Query System for Children
Tamara Polajnar, Richard Glassey, Leif Azzopardi, SIGIR '11: Proceeding of the 34th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, 2011

Search For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge
Leif Azzopardi, ACM SIGIR Entertain Me Workshop, 2011

Perq'ing up student writing
Leif Azzopard, The 4th Annual University of Glasgow Learning and Teaching Conference, Glasgow, PDF

Peer Evaluation in Computing Science
Leif Azzopardi (with David Nicol and John Hamer) Peer Evaluation in Education Review (PEER) Project, Case Study

Back to the roots: mean-variance analysis of relevance estimations
Zuccon, G., Azzopardi, L., van Rijsbergen, K. ECIR'11: Proceedings of the 33rd European conference on Advances in information retrieval

Investigating Subspace Distances in Semantic Spaces
G. Zuccon, L. Azzopardi, E. Gasco Proceedings of the Italian Information Retrieval Workshop, 2011

Introduction to special issue on the second international conference on the theory of information retrieval
Leif Azzopardi, Dawei Song, Gabriella Kazai, Stephen Robertson, Stefan Rüger, Milad Shokouhi, Emine Yilmaz, Information Retrieval , Volume 14 Issue 1, 2011

Report on the SIGIR 2010 workshop on the simulation of interaction Leif Azzopardi, Kalervo Järvelin, Jaap Kamps, Mark D. Smucker SIGIR Forum , Volume 44 Issue 2, January 2011s


--- 2010 ---
A comparison of user and system query performance predictions
Claudia Hauff, Diane Kelly, Leif Azzopardi CIKM '10: Proceedings of the 19th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management, 2010

A survey of patent users: an analysis of tasks, behavior, search functionality and system requirements
Hideo Joho, Leif A. Azzopardi, Wim Vanderbauwhede IIiX '10: Proceeding of the third symposium on Information interaction in context, 2010

Interaction-based information filtering for children
Richard Glassey, Desmond Elliott, Tamara Polajnar, Leif Azzopardi IIiX '10: Proceeding of the third symposium on Information interaction in context, 2010

On the relationship between effectiveness and accessibility
Leif Azzopardi, Richard Bache SIGIR '10: Proceeding of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, 2010

Improving sentence retrieval with an importance prior Leif Azzopardi, Ronald T. Fernández, David E. Losada SIGIR '10: Proceeding of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, 2010

Has portfolio theory got any principles?
Guido Zuccon, Leif Azzopardi, C.J. "Keith" van Rijsbergen SIGIR '10: Proceeding of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, 2010

Search system requirements of patent analysts
Leif Azzopardi, Wim Vanderbauwhede, Hideo Joho SIGIR '10: Proceeding of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, 2010

Query quality: user ratings and system predictions
Claudia Hauff, Franciska de Jong, Diane Kelly, Leif Azzopardi SIGIR '10: Proceeding of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval

Finding and filtering information for children
Desmond Elliot, Richard Glassey, Tamara Polajnar, Leif Azzopardi SIGIR '10: Proceeding of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, 2010

Estimating interference in the QPRP for subtopic retrieval Guido Zuccon, Leif Azzopardi, Claudia Hauff, C.J. Keith van Rijsbergen SIGIR '10: Proceeding of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, 2010

Improving access to large patent corpora
Richard Bache, Leif Azzopardi Transactions on large-scale data- and knowledge-centered systems II, January 2010

How Quantum Theory is Developing the Field of Information Retrieval
D. Song, M. Lalmas, C.J. van Rijsbergen, I. Frommholz, B. Piwowarski, J. Wang, P. Zhang, G. Zuccon, P.D. Bruza S. Arafat, L. Azzopardi, E. Di Buccio, A. Huertas-Rosero, Y. Hou, M. Melucci, S. Rüger Proceedings of Quantum Interactions, 2010


--- 2009 ---

Usage Based Effectiveness Measures: Monitoring Application Performance in Information Retrieval
Azzopardi L. To appear in the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2009), 2009


Query Side Evaluation: An empirical study of effectiveness and effort
Azzopardi L. Proceedings of the 32th Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2009), 2009


Search Engine Predilection towards News Media Providers
Azzopardi L. Owens C. Proceedings of the 32th Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2009), 2009


Developing Energy Efficient Filtering Systems
Azzopardi L. Vanderbauwhede W. Moadeli M. Proceedings of the 32th Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2009), 2009


Evaluating Personal Information Management Behaviour using Markov Models
Elsweiler D. Mandl S. Azzopardi L. Wissensmanagement, 2009


Relying on Topic Subsets for System Ranking Estimation
Hauff C. Hiemstra D. Azzopardi L. de Jong F. To appear in the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2009), 2009


When is Query Performance Prediction Effective?
Hauff C. Azzopardi L. Proceedings of the 32th Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2009), 2009


Query Performance Prediction
Hauff C. Azzopardi L. Hiemstra D. BCS-IRSG European Conference in Information Retrieval, 2009


Eraser Lattices and Semantic Contents: An Exploration of the Semantic Contents in Order Relations between Erasers
Huertas-Rosero A.F. Azzopardi L. van Rijsbergen C.J. Quantum Interactions, 2009


Effective Query Expansion for Federated Information Retrieval
Shokouki M. Azzopardi L. Thomas P. Proceedings of the 32th Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2009), 2009


FPGA-Accelerated Information Retrieval: High-Efficiency Document Filtering
Vanderbauwhede W. Azzopardi L. Moadeli M. Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL2009), 2009


Semantic Spaces: Measuring the Distance between Subspaces
Zuccon G. Azzopardi L. van Rijsbergen C.J. Quantum Interactions, 2009


--- 2008 ---

Retrievability: An Evaluation Measure for Higher Order Information Access Tasks
Azzopardi L. Vinay V. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference in Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2008), 2008
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Accessibility in Information Retrieval
Azzopardi L. Vinay V. BCS-IRSG European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2008), 2008
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Document Accessibility: Evaluating the access afforded to a document by the retrieval system
Azzopardi L. Vinay V. Evaluation Workshop at the European Conference in Information Retrieval, 2008


Personal Name Resolution of Web People Search
Balog K. Azzopardi L. de Rijke M. WWW 2008 Workshop: NLP Challenges in the Information Explosion Era (NLPIX 2008), 2008
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A Language Modeling Framework for Expert Search
Balog K. Azzopardi L. de Rijke M. Information Processing and Management, 2008


Towards Creating a Test Collection for European Patents
Graf E. Azzopardi L. Patent Retrieval Workshop (PaIR 2008), 2008


A Methodology for Building a Patent Test Collection for Prior Art Search
Graf E. Azzopardi L. The Second International Workshop on Evaluating Information Access (EVIA 2008), 2008
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Characterising Through Erasing: A Theoretical Framework for Representing Documents Inspired by Quantum Theory
Huertas-Rosero A.F. Azzopardi L. van Rijsbergen C.J. Quantum Interactions, 2008
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Collaborative Annotation for Pseudo Relevance Feedback
Lioma C. Moens M.F. Azzopardi L. Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval Workshop (ESAIR) at ECIR, 2008


Assessing Multi-variate Bernoulli models for Information Retrieval
Losada D. Azzopardi L. ACM Transactions of Information Systems, 2008


Revisiting the Relationship between Document Length and Relevance
Losada D. Azzopardi L. Baillie M. ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2008


An analysis on document length retrieval trends in language modeling smoothing
Losada D. Azzopardi L. Journal of Information Retrieval, 2008


A Formalization of Logical Imaging for Information Retrieval using Quantum Theory
Zuccon G. Azzopardi L. van Rijsbergen C.J. IEEE International Workshop on Text-based Information Retrieval, 2008


--- 2007 ---

Contextual factors affecting the utility of surrogates within exploratory search
Ruthven I. Baillie M. Azzopardi L. Bierig R. Nicol E. Sweeney S. Yakici M. Information Processing and Management: Special Issue on Evaluating Exploratory Search Systems, 2007


Intra-assessor consistency in question answering
Ruthven I. Azzopardi L. Baillie M. Bierig R. Nicol E. Sweeney S. Yakici M. Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2007), 2007


Broad Expertise Retrieval in Sparse Data Environments
Balog K. Bogers T. Azzopardi L. de Rijke M. van den Bosch A. Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2007), 2007
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Building Simulated Queries for Known-Item Topics: An Analysis using Six European Languages
Azzopardi L. de Rijke M. Balog K. Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2007), 2007


Updating Collection Representations For Federated Search
Shokouhi M. Baillie M. Azzopardi L. Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2007), 2007


Evaluating epistemic uncertainty under incomplete assessments
Baillie M. Azzopardi L. Ruthven I. Information Processing and Management, 2007


An Alternative Formulations of Relevance within the Language Modeling framework
Azzopardi L. Roelleke T. The proceedings of the 1st International Conference in Theory of Information Retrieval pp 125--134, 2007


Fairly Retrieving Documents of All Lengths
Azzopardi L. Losada D. The Proceedings of the 1st International Conference in Theory of Information Retrieval pp 65--76, 2007


Towards Evaluating the User Experience of Interactive Information Access Systems
Azzopardi L. Proceedings of the Web Information-Seeking and Interaction (WISI) Workshop at SIGIR 2007, 2007


A Retrieval Evaluation Methodology for Incomplete Relevance Assessments
Baillie M. Azzopardi L. Ruthven I. Proceedings of the 29th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2007), 2007


Language Modeling Techniques for Web People Search
Balog K. Azzopardi L. de Rijke M. Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2007), 2007


--- 2006 ---

Query Intention Acquisition: A Case Study on Automatically Inferring Structured Queries
Azzopardi L. de Rijke M. Proceedings of the Dutch Belgian Workshop in Information Retrieval (DIR 2006), 2006
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An Evaluation of Resource Description Quality Measures
Baillie M. Azzopardi L. Crestani F. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2006), 2006
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The Efficient Computation of the Multiple Bernoulli Model
Azzopardi L. Losada D. Proceedings of the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2006) pp 480-483, 2006
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Language Modeling Approaches for Enterprise Tasks
Azzopardi L. Balog K. de Rijke M. Proceedings of the 14th Text Retrieval Conference (TREC 2005), 2006
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Combining Theasauri-based Methods for Biomedical Retrieval
Meij E. IJzereef L. Azzopardi L. Kamps J. de Rijke M. Proceedings of the 14th Text Retrieval Conference (TREC 2005), 2006
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Towards better Measures: Evaluation of the Resource Description Quality for Distributed Information Retrieval
Baillie M. Azzopardi L. Crestani F. Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Scalable Information Systems, 2006
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Adaptive Query Based Sampling of Distributed Collections
Baillie M. Azzopardi L. Crestani F. Proceedings of the 13th Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE 2006), 2006
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An Application Framework for Distributed Information Retrieval
Simeoni F. Azzopardi L. Crestani F. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL 2006), 2006


Formal Models for Expert Finding in Enterprise Corpora
Balog K. Azzopardi L. de Rijke M. Proceedings of the 29 Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2006), 2006


Adaptive Query Based Sampling of Distributed Information Retrieval
Azzopardi L. Baillie M. Crestani F. Proceedings of the 29 Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2006), 2006
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Automatic Construction of Known-Item Finding Test Beds
Azzopardi L. de Rijke M. Proceedings of the 29 Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2006), 2006
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ECIR Reviewing Workshop
Azzopardi L. MacFarlane A. Ounis I. Editors of the Proceedings of the ECIR Reviewing Workshop (ECIR-RW 2006), 2006


Contextual information and assessor characteristics in complex question answering
Azzopardi C. Azzopardi L. Baillie M. Bierig R. Nicol E. Ruthven I. Sweeney S. Proceedings of the 15th TExt Retrieval Conference (TREC 2006), 2006
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--- 2005 ---

Age Dependent Document Priors in Link Structure Analysis
Hauff C. Azzopardi L. Proceedings of the 27th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2005) pp 552-554, 2005
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Incorporating Context within the Language Modeling Approach for ad hoc Information Retrieval
Azzopardi L. PhD Thesis University of Paisley, 2005
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Probabilistic Hyperspace Analogue to Language
Azzopardi L. Girolami M. Crowe M. Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2005) pp 575-576, 2005
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--- 2004 ---

Workshop on Evaluating User Studies in Information Access pp 251
Bailey A. Ruthven I. Azzopardi L. filename , 2004
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Topic Based Language Models for Ad Hoc Information Retrieval
Azzopardi L. Girolami M. van Rijsbergen C.J. Proceedings of the International Joint Conference in Neural Networks (IJCNN 2004), 2004
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An investigation into the utility of the probabilistic interpretation of the Hyper space Analogue to Language (HAL)
Azzopardi L. Computing and Information Systems Technical Report 27 University of Paisley, 2004
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The Proceedings of the Glasgow-Strathclyde Information Retrieval Workshop
Azzopardi L. Ruthven I. Crestani F. van Rijsbergen C.J. DCS Tech Report pp 38 Dept of Computing Science University of Glasgow, 2004
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User Biased Document Language Modelling
Azzopardi L. Girolami M. van Rijsbergen C.J. Proceedings of the 27th Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2004) pp 542-544, 2004


--- 2003 ---

Investigating the Relationship between Language Model Perplexity and IR Precision-Recall Measures
Azzopardi L. Girolami M. van Rijsbergen C.J. Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2003) pp 369-370, 2003


Preprocessing Data in the Classification Process
Azzopardi L. Computer Science Departmental Journal Paisley University, 2003


--- 2001 ---

Representational Heuristics
Azzopardi L. Aisbett J. Gibbon G. In the proceedings of the Australasian Mathematical Psychology Conference (Extended Abstract), 2001


--- 1999 ---

Wave Motion
Azzopardi L. Proceedings of the Pan-Sydney Area Workshop on Visual Information Processing, 1999

Biography

Dr. Leif Azzopardi is currently an RCUK Research Fellow within the Glasgow Information Retrieval Group and a full time academic member of staff within the Department of Computing Science, at the University of Glasgow. He currently supervises several PhD and MSc Students on projects in ranging from traditional formal models based research and applications of Information Retrieval to extreme models, methods and applications (such as those based on Quantum Theory or Transportation Planning).

His research interests include: distributed information retrieval models and systems, formal models, specifically probabilistic models such as the Language Model, or Convergence to Order Framework, and the Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems. More recently, he has began to develop the idea of “Accessibility” from Transportation Planning to the management and evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems. Previously, Dr Azzopardi was a Post Doctoral Researcher within iLab at the University of Strathclyde in 2006, and ILPS at the University of Amsterdam in 2005. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Paisley in 2005, where he was supervised by Prof. Mark Girolami, Prof. Malcolm Crowe and Prof. Keith van Rijsbergen. Prior to this he received First Class Honours Degree in Information Science from the University of Newcastle, Australia, 2001. He was also the past Chair of the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group (2006-2008).