by Sergio Duarte Torres, Djoerd Hiemstra and Theo Huibers 

In this paper we explore the vertical selection methods in aggregated search in the specific domain of topics for children between 7 and 12 years old. A test collection consisting of 25 verticals, 3.8K queries and relevant assessments for a large sample of these queries mapping relevant verticals to queries was built. We gather relevant assessment by envisaging two aggregated search systems: one in which the Web vertical is always displayed and in which each vertical is assessed independently from the web vertical. We show that both approaches lead to a di?erent set of relevant verticals and that the former is prone to bias of visually oriented verticals. In the second part of this paper we estimate the size of the verticals for the target domain. We show that employing the global size and domain specific size estimation of the verticals lead to significant improvements when using state-of-the art methods of vertical selection. We also introduce a novel vertical and query representation based on tags from social media and we show that its use lead to significant performance gains. Read the paper

This paper has been nominated for the best student paper award at JCDL 2013.