Well, it finally happened. I published a paper on my PhD thesis work. It got accepted at HICSS-42 in the Digital Media: Content and Communication track under the Information Access and Retrieval: The Web, Users, and HCI mini-track. The abstract is below.
When reading online, users sometimes need auxiliary information to complement or fill in their own background knowledge in order to better understand a document that they are reading. We believe that delivering this information in the least intrusive fashion possible will improve their understanding. We have prototyped a system that selects a single Wikipedia article for users when they highlight text in an abstract. This prototype employs a contextual retrieval algorithm developed for high precision retrieval of Wikipedia articles that uses the terms in the abstract, currently being read, as a context for the search. The results from our evaluation reveal that the top-performing algorithm is able to respond with a single relevant article 77% of the time. The user study that we conducted indicates that participants have a strong preference for this approach to searching while reading.
In other news, Softpedia apparently reviewed my Firefox extension, LiteraryMark. That is the prototype that I developed and used in the above mentioned HICSS paper. As you can guess, it is 100% free of adware/spyware.