INESC TEC researchers win competition on data mining

A team of nine researchers, four of which from INESC TEC, led by the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP) was the winner of the Filtering task at the data mining competition RepLab 2013, which took place between 15 April and 27 May.

The team including researchers from FEUP, from the Faculty of Science of the University of Porto, Labs Sapo and INESC TEC won first place after competing with a total of 11 teams.

The Filtering task consisted of creating automatic methods to disambiguate entities (companies, celebrities, among others) in Tweets using natural language processing techniques and automating learning algorithms so as to classify the Tweets as being related to a certain entity or not.

According to Carlos Soares, researcher at INESC TEC's Manufacturing Systems Engineering Unit (UESP) and member of the group, the interdisciplinary team with elements from several units related to the University of Porto “illustrates how the university has been improving its data science skills, which are more and more important to companies and to society”. The INESC TEC team also includes researchers Fábio Pinto, Mohammad Nozari and Catarina Félix.

This participation in the RepLab 2013 took place as part of two projects financed by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, the REACTION and the POPSTAR. The results will be presented and discussed at CLEF 2013 (Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum), which will take place between 23 and 26 September at the Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain.

The RepLab is a competition promoted by CLEF 2013 and its purpose is to monitor the reputation of entities on Twitter.

The INESC TEC researchers mentioned in this article are associated with the following partner institutions: FEUP, FCUP, INESC Porto.