From March 28th to April 1st, the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) was held online. Prof. ZHAO Xin from RUC Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence won the Test of Time Award for his ECIR 2011 article “Comparing Twitter and Traditional Media Using Topic Models.”

The Test of Time Award is the top ECIR paper award, awarding papers that have made significant impact in information retrieval research in the past 10 years. Prof. ZHAO’s award- winning research is an extraction and analysis of topic semantics of social media. In the paper he proposed a topic model Twitter-LDA for micro-blog text, which has had an important impact on the topic semantics research on short texts. The paper has been cited over 1400 times and has been used by more than 100 researchers as a baseline method or data preprocessing method.