Alexander Kotov Post-Doctoral Fellow Adjunct Assistant Professor Intelligent Information Access Lab Department of Mathematics & Computer Science Emory University
	Contact Information: Office: Emerson Hall, E500 (5th floor) Email: kotov at mathcs dot emory dot edu            alex dot s dot kotov at gmail dot com Phone: (404) 727-6152	Mailing address: Math & CS Department, Emory University 400 Dowman Drive, Suite W401 Atlanta, Georgia 30322, USA

Recent news

• I will be attending WWW 2013 between May 15-17 to present some results on improving microblog retrieval by incorporating geographically-specific topics into retrieval models.
• I am on the Program Committee of 2013 IEEE International Conference on Big Data.
• I received the Best Reviewer Award at EMNLP-CoNLL 2012.

About Me

I am currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Emory University working with Professor Eugene Agichtein and Professor Hongyuan Zha at Georgia Tech. In 2011, I graduated with a Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At UIUC I was advised by Professor ChengXiang Zhai and was a member of the Textual Information Management (TIMan) research group. My broad research interests are in natural language processing and textual information management, with an emphasis on interactive and intelligent information retrieval, topic modeling, textual data mining and social media analysis.

Work experience:

• Research Intern, Microsoft Research, 2010
• Research Intern, Yahoo! Labs, 2008
• Research Assistant, UIUC, 2006-2011
• Teaching Assistant, UIUC, 2004-2006

Teaching experience:

• CS 572 "Information Retrieval", Emory University, Spring 2012

Publications:

1. Alexander Kotov, Yu Wang and Eugene Agichtein. "Leveraging Geographical Metadata to Improve Search over Social Media", poster paper, In Proceedings of the 22nd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'13), to appear [pdf]
2. Alexander Kotov and ChengXiang Zhai. "Tapping into Knowledge Base for Concept Feedback: Leveraging ConceptNet to Improve Search Results for Difficult Queries", full paper, In Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'12), pages 403-412 (acceptance rate 21%) [pdf]
3. Alexander Kotov and ChengXiang Zhai. "Interactive Sense Feedback for Difficult Queries", full paper, In Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'11), pages 163-172 (acceptance rate 15%) [pdf, slides]
4. Alexander Kotov, Paul Bennett, Ryen White, Susan Dumais and Jaime Teevan. "Modeling and Analysis of Cross-Session Search Tasks", full paper, In Proceedings of the 34th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'11), pages 5-14 (acceptance rate 20%) [pdf, slides]
5. Alexander Kotov, ChengXiang Zhai and Richard Sproat. "Mining Named Entities with Temporally Correlated Bursts from Multilingual Web News Streams", full paper, In Proceedings of the 4th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'11), pages 237-246 (acceptance rate 8%) [pdf, slides]
6. Alexander Kotov, Pranam Kolari, Lei Duan and Yi Chang. "Temporal Query Log Profiling to Improve Web Search Ranking", full paper, In Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'10), pages 1149-1158 (acceptance rate 13%) [pdf, slides]
7. Alexander Kotov and ChengXiang Zhai. "Towards Natural Question-Guided Search", full paper, In Proceedings of the 19th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'10), pages 541-550 (acceptance rate 14%) [pdf, slides]

Professional activities:

• PC member: IEEE BigData 2013, NAACL 2013, SIGIR 2013, WWW 2013, EMNLP-CoNLL 2012, SIGIR 2012, CIKM 2012, AAAI 2012, WWW 2012, SIGIR 2011 (Posters Track), SIGIR 2011 Workshop on Query Representation and Understanding
• Conference reviewer: WSDM 2012
• Journal reviewer: ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), Information Processing & Management, Information Retrieval, The Knowledge Engineering Review

Last updated: April, 2013