In its first year to compete, a team from UALR’s Donaghey College of Information Science and Systems Engineering competed with some of the worlds foremost computer schools in the NIST contest and was one of only five teams invited to present their work results at a November conference.

It was the first year for UALR to participate in the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) organized by the National Institute of Standards. The UALR team – student Hemant Joshi and Professors Coskun Bayrak and Xiaowei Xu – competed against 28 others, including teams from John Hopkins University, Carnegie Mellon University, CSIRO ICT Centre in Australia, the University of Maryland at College Park, Indiana University, the University of Pisa, Italy, University of Amsterdam, NEC labs, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Chicago, and more.

The information retrieval required teams to scour millions of blogs for specific pieces of information and rank each for relevancy. The UALR team was selected to present its work and results with the Information Retrieval community at November conference.

“For the opinion retrieval task – ranking blog posts by the most opinionated first, the median Mean Average Precision (MAP) is 0.1059 and UALR-IR group achieved performance of 0.0715,” said Herman Joshi, a Ph.D. candidate in in applied science, working under Bayrak’s supervision.

“We beat MAP scores by Chinese Academy of Sciences, National Institute of Informatics and Robert Gordon University in UK. Considering this was the first year for UALR participation, we feel satisfied with our performance.”