Paul Thomas

I'm a researcher at the CSIRO. I'm interested in information retrieval, particularly distributed retrieval, search over heterogeneous data, and evaluation.

IR (and friends)

I coordinate a fortnightly discussion group for people at ANU and nearby who work in information retrieval and related areas.

Publications

Full-text versions of papers provided via this site are author versions. In the case of ACM publications (SIGIR, CIKM, etc) they are posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use; in the case of Springer publications (IR, etc) they are posted here by permission of Springer for your personal use. Not for redistribution.

2012

Jie Yin, Nalin Narang, Paul Thomas, and Cécile Paris. 2012. Unifying local and global agreement and disagreement classification in online debates. To appear in Proc. Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis. Jeju.
Cécile Paris, Paul Thomas, and Stephen Wan. 2012. Differences in language and style between two social media communities. To appear in Proc. AAAI Conf. on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). Dublin.
Paul Thomas. 2012. To what problem is distributed information retrieval the solution? To appear in J American Society for Information Science and Technology.

2011

Sally Jo Cunningham, Falk Scholer, and Paul Thomas (eds). 2011. Proceedings of the sixteenth Australasian Document Computing Symposium. Canberra.
Timothy Jones, Paul Thomas, David Hawking, and Ramesh Sankaranarayana. 2011. The usefulness of web spam. In Proc. Australasian Document Computing Symposium, pp9-11. Canberra.
Timothy Jones, David Hawking, Paul Thomas, and Ramesh Sankaranarayana. 2011. Relative effect of spam and irrelevant documents on user interaction with search engines. In Proc. ACM Conf on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), pp2113-2116. Glasgow.
Paul Thomas, Timothy Jones, and David Hawking. 2011. What deliberately degrading search quality tells us about discount functions. In Proc. Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), pp1107-1108. Beijing

2010

Paul Thomas, Alex O'Neill, and Cécile Paris. 2010. Interaction differences in web search and browse logs. In Proc. Australasian Document Computing Symposium, Melbourne.
Cécile Paris, Stephen Wan, and Paul Thomas. 2010. Focused and aggregated search: A perspective from natural language generation. Information Retrieval 13:434-459.
Paul Thomas. 2010. The PERS metasearch library. Technical report, CSIRO ICT Centre.
Paul Thomas, Katherine Noack, and Cécile Paris. Evaluating interfaces for government metasearch. In Proc. Information Interaction in Context (IIiX), pp65-74. New Brunswick.
Paul Thomas and David Hawking. 2010. Metasearch tools for desktop search. In Proc. SIGIR workshop on desktop search, pp33-4. Geneva.
Paul Thomas and Milad Shokouhi. 2010. Evaluating server selection for federated search. In Proc. European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), pp607-610. Milton Keynes.

2009

Judy Kay, Paul Thomas, and Andrew Trotman (eds). 2009. Proceedings of the fourteenth Australasian Document Computing Symposium. Sydney.
Tom Rowlands, Paul Thomas, and Stephen Wan. 2009. Web indexing on a diet: template removal with the sandwich algorithm. In Proc. Australasian Document Computing Symposium, pp115-7. Sydney.
Kristian Balog, Arjen P de Vries, Pavel Serdyukov, Paul Thomas, and Thijs Westerveld. 2009. Overview of the TREC 2009 Entity Track. In Proc. Text Retrieval Conference (TREC). Gaithersburg.
Paul Thomas and David Hawking. 2009. Server selection methods in personal metasearch: a comparative empirical study. Information Retrieval 12:581-604.
Cécile Paris, Nathalie Colineau, Paul Thomas, and Ross Wilkinson. 2009. Stakeholders and their respective costs-benefits in IR evaluation. In Proc. SIGIR workshop on the Future of IR Evaluation, pp9-10. Boston.
David Hawking, Paul Thomas, Tom Gedeon, Tim Jones, and Tom Rowlands. 2009. New methods for creating testfiles: Tuning enterprise search with C-TEST. In Proc. SIGIR workshop on the Future of IR Evaluation, pp5-6. Boston.
Paul Thomas and Milad Shokouhi. 2009. SUSHI: Scoring scaled samples for server selection. In Proc. Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), pp419-426. Boston.
Milad Shokouhi, Leif Azzopardi, and Paul Thomas. 2009. Effective query expansion for federated search. In Proc. Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), pp427-434. Boston.
David Hawking, Tom Rowlands, and Paul Thomas. 2009. C-TEST: Supporting novelty and diversity in testfiles for search evaluation. In Proc. SIGIR workshop on redundancy, diversity and interdependent document relevance. Boston.
Stephen Wan, Paul Thomas, and Tom Rowlands. 2009. Web indexing on a diet: template removal with the sandwich algorithm. Technical report, CSIRO ICT Centre.
Paul Thomas. 2009. Quality of language models for distributed information retrieval. Technical report, CSIRO ICT Centre.

2008

Paul Thomas. 2008d. Server characterisation and selection for personal metasearch. SIGIR Forum 42(2), pp108-109.
Krisztian Balog, Ian Soboroff, Paul Thomas, Peter Bailey, Nick Craswell, and Arjen P. de Vries. 2008. Overview of the TREC 2008 Enterprise Track. In Proc. Text Retrieval Conference (TREC).
Peter Bailey, Nick Craswell, Ian Soboroff, Paul Thomas, Arjen de Vries, and Emine Yilmaz. 2008. Relevance assessment: are judges exchangeable and does it matter? In Proc. Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), pp667-674. Singapore.
Paul Thomas. 2008a. Generalising multiple capture-recapture to non-uniform sample sizes. In Proc. Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), pp839-840. Singapore.
Rob McArthur, Paul Thomas, Andrew Turpin, and Mingfang Wu. Proceedings of the thirteenth Australasian Document Computing Symposium. Hobart.
Paul Thomas and David Hawking. 2008. Experiences evaluating personal metasearch. In Proc. Information Interaction in Context (IIiX), pp136-8. London.
Paul Thomas. 2008c. Implementation of PIS. Technical report, ANU Department of Computer Science.
Paul Thomas. 2008b. Server characterisation and selection for personal metasearch. PhD thesis, Australian National University.

2007

Peter Bailey, Paul Thomas, and David Hawking. 2007. Does brandname influence perceived search result quality? Yahoo!, Google, and WebKumara. In Proc. Australasian Document Computing Symposium. Melbourne.
Paul Thomas and David Hawking. 2007. Evaluating sampling methods for uncooperative collections. In Proc. Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), pp503-510. Amsterdam.
Paul Thomas and Tom Rowlands. 2007. Estimating the value of automatic disambiguation. In Proc. Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), pp719-720. Amsterdam.

Earlier

Paul Thomas and David Hawking. 2006. Evaluation by comparing result sets in context. In Proc. ACM Conf on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), pp94-101. Arlington.
David Hawking and Paul Thomas. 2005. Server selection methods in hybrid portal search. In Proc. Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), pp75-82. Salvador.
Mingfang Wu, Paul Thomas, and David Hawking. 2005. TREC 14 enterprise track at CSIRO and ANU. In Proc. Text Retrieval Conference (TREC). Gaithersburg.
Craig Wills and Paul Thomas. 1999. Exploiting a network charging model to reduce web costs. In Proc. AusWeb. Ballina.

Data

Division of .GOV and .GOV2 corpora by server: hosts in .GOV and .GOV2; id-to-host map for .GOV and .GOV2.
List of homepages in .GOV.
Search interface finder run over the above.