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The paper, “Learning User Interaction Models for Predicting Web Search Result Preferences,” represents one of 13 papers to be presented by Microsoft Research at the 29th annual ACM SIGIR (Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) conference on search and information retrieval in Seattle this week. Microsoft Research contributed the largest number of papers to this year’s conference, presenting 17.5 percent of the 74 papers accepted out of a record 399 submissions. SIGIR is a top international forum for the presentation of new research results and the demonstration of new systems and techniques in the broad field of information retrieval.

Another Microsoft Research paper by the same authors, “Improving Web Search Ranking by Incorporating User Behavior,” discusses utilizing the discovered patterns of internet user behavior to improve algorithms that rank search engine results. This work is significant because it demonstrates how to add a new rich set of user behavior features into ranking for large relevance gains.

Links to the papers Microsoft Research contributed to this year’s SIGIR conference, as well as to the Microsoft papers presented at the 2004 and 2005 conferences, are available at http://research.microsoft.com/news/featurestories/source/sigirpapers2006.aspx.