WebProNews

Today, the 32nd annual ACM SIGIR (Special Interest Group for Information Retrieval) Conference kicked off in Boston. The five-day event is taking place in Boston.

The Microsoft Research Group is showing off some "future-looking innovations" at the event, in the search and information retrieval field, naturally.

"That should come as little surprise," says Microsoft Senior Writer Rob Knies. "Microsoft Research has a history of strong participation in SIGIR. Over the past four years, 58 papers from the organization’s labs have been accepted for presentation during this prestigious conference, an indication of how seriously Microsoft is taking its goals of refining and advancing the state of the art in information retrieval."

Some of the things they are looking at this year include:

- Context Aware Query Classification

- Breaking news - a prediction algorithm for news-related queries that attempts to figure out what and when to display certain content

- Analogical reasoning - trying to find the best answer to a question and help cut through bad answers

"Bottom line: being able to find a good answer in online communities to 'I'm having problems in soldering some 8MSOP chips to my vero board' might just get easier," says Bing Director Stefan Weitz. 

Microsoft is actually involved with 21 out of the 74 papers being presented at the conference this year. 7 of them (so far) can be viewed from this page.