Is spam an issue for opinionated blog post search?

ABSTRACT

In opinion-finding, the retrieval system is tasked with retrieving not just relevant documents, but those that also express an opinion towards the query target entity. This task has been studied in the context of the blogosphere by groups participating in the 2006-2008 TREC Blog tracks. Spam blogs (splogs) are thought to be a problem on the blogosphere. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which spam has affected the participating groups' retrieval systems over the three years of the TREC Blog track opinion-finding task. Our results show that spam can be an issue, with most systems retrieving some spam for every topic. However, removing spam from the rankings does not markedly change the relative performance of opinion-finding approaches.

REFERENCES

• 1: P. Kolari, A. Java, and T. Finin. Characterizing the Splogosphere. In Proceedings of 3rd WWE Workshop at WWW'06, Edinburgh, UK, 2006.
• 2: I. Ounis, C. Macdonald, and I. Soboroff. On the TREC Blog Track. In Proceedings of ICWSM-2008, Seattle, USA, 2008.
• 3: I. Ounis, C. Macdonald, I. Soboroff. Overview of TREC-2008 Blog track. In Proceedings of TREC-2008, Gaithersburg, USA, 2009.
• 4: C. Macdonald and I. Ounis. The TREC Blog06 Collection: Creating and Analysing a Blog Test Collection. DCS Technical Report TR-2006-224. Univ. of Glasgow. 2006. http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~craigm/publications/macdonald06creating.pdf

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval

General Terms:
Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
blogs, opinion-finding, spam, splogs