Marwa Essam, a Computer Science PhD candidate in our CSE department, supervised by Dr. Tamer Elsayed, has received the “Best Doctoral Consortium Paper Award”, based on her paper that summarizes her PhD proposal, at the 43^rd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2021) that was just held last week. ECIR is one of the top conferences in the IR field, and is ranked at the “A” level in the CORE conference ranking.

Marwa’s proposed dissertation is titled “Background Linking of News Articles”. The proposed research aims to help readers of online news articles to better understand the articles they are reading. Online news articles have become a valuable source of information for many users on the web. Nonetheless, most often, authors of news articles assume that readers have some background knowledge on the subject they are reading, and they leave it up to the readers to seek knowledge for what they did not understand elsewhere. All the information regarding any subject or event, hence, rarely exists in a single news article. Furthermore, the links that are nowadays added to articles are either links to articles written by the same author, or articles that are mostly viewed by other readers, not background links. Accordingly, the proposed research suggests several approaches to automatically provide the readers with links to other resources that contain the context and background knowledge that is often missing. This allows news articles to be usefully linked given the background knowledge they provide to one another, and, as a result, enhances the knowledge acquisition process for newsreaders.

Congratulations to Marwa and Dr. Tamer for the great achievement!