Niranjan Balasubramanian

Graduate Student

Department of Computer Science
University of Massachusetts Amherst
niranjan at cs dot umass dot edu


Short Bio
I am a fourth year graduate student at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR). Prior to joining CIIR, I was a software engineer at the Center For Natural Language Processing(CNLP) at Syracuse University. I completed my Masters degree in Computer Science at the University of Buffalo in 2003. You can find a detailed resume here.

Research Interests

Mobile Information Retrieval

I am interested in understanding the impact of system constraints on information retrieval from mobile phones. For instance, energy consumption of network activity is a key constraint on mobile phones and has a direct impact on web search which is essentially an interactive network application [IMC 2009].

Sentence Retrieval

Idetifying sentences that contain overlapping information is useful for several natural language applications such as Text Reuse Detection, Multi-Document Summarization, and Novelty Detection. I explored retrieval of restatements as a sentence retrieval task, comparing statistical approaches [SIGIR 2007] and proposed effective syntactic query models in a language modeling framework [SPIRE 2009].

Automatic Topic Pages

As an alternative to the standard ten blue links for presenting search results, I explored automatically generating topic pages which present information on diverse aspects pertaining to the topic [CIKM 2009].

Publications

1. Balasubramanian, N., Balasubramanian, A., Venkataramani, A., Energy Consumption in Mobile Phones: A Measurement Study and Implications for Network Applications. To appear in the Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2009.

2. Balasubramanian, N., and Allan, J., Syntactic Query Models for Restatement Retrieval. In the Proceedings of String Processing and Information Retrieval Symposium, Saariselka, Finland, August 25-27 2009.

3. Balasubramanian, N. and Cucerzan, S., Automatic Generation of Topic Pages using Query-based Aspect Models, a short paper to appear in the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Hong Kong, 2009.

4. Balasubramanian, N., Allan, J. and Croft, W. B. , "A Comparison of Sentence Retrieval Techniques" a poster presentation at the 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR-07) Amsterdam, Netherlands, July 23-27 2007

5. Yilmazel, O., Balasubramanian, N., Harwell , S.C. , Bailey, J., Diekema, A.R., Liddy, E.D., (2006) Text Categorization for Aligning Educational Standards. To appear in the Proceedings of the HICSS 2007, Hawaii.

6. Yilmazel, O., Symonenko, S., Balasubramanian, N., Liddy, E.D. (2006) Leveraging One-class SVM in Semantic Analysis for Anamalous Content Detection. To appear in Reid, E. (Ed) Terrorism Infomatics.

7. Yilmazel, O., Symonenko, S., Balasubramanian, N., Liddy, E.D. (2005) Improved Document Representation for Classification Tasks for the Intelligence Community in the Proceedings of the 2005 AAAI Spring Symposium Series.

8. Yilmazel, O., Symonenko, S., Balasubramanian, N., Liddy, E.D. (2005) Leveraging One-class SVM in Semantic Analysis for Anamalous Content Detection in the Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics.