Editorial
Welcome to a new edition of Informer! Ever wondered how to best get from London to Aberdeen? On a sleeper train! If you are confident enough that your paper gets accepted at ECIR 2017, then why not book early (to avoid disappointment) as it is now official that ECIR 2017 will be hosted by the […]
News Information Retrieval is calling!
News is generating renewed interest in IR prompted by the recent seismic shifts in the global newspaper industry and the changes in audience habits to consume news [1]. While printed news still makes up the better part of the global newspaper revenues, digital news is a fast growing contributor, especially in North America and Europe.
Detecting adverse-drug effects in natural language using limited training data
A large amount of information is provided in text documents but difficult to access for computer programs. In order to detect complex information it is often important to understand the relationships between words and entities in sentences. A relation can express for instance that a disease has a particular finding or a that a drug […]
Search strategies considered harmful
Over the last few months I’ve been looking in detail at the process of search strategy formulation, i.e. the various ways in which professionals go about solving the problem of resolving complex information needs. Some professions (e.g. recruitment professionals) employ complex search queries to address sourcing needs, generating queries such as this:
Introduction to the Cochrane Information Retrieval Methods Group
The Cochrane Information Retrieval Methods Group (IRMG) was formed in 2004. Its remit is to provide advice to Cochrane on information retrieval policy and practice, to provide training and support, to conduct empirical research (including systematic reviews) into information retrieval methods, to help monitor the quality of searching techniques employed in systematic reviews and to serve […]
Call for Book Reviews (Autumn 2015)
This issue we include another Call for Reviews in which we seek reviewers for a number of recently published books that may be of interest to the IR community. Books will be allocated for review on a first-come-first-served basis and you would have about one month to carry out the review. If you are interested […]
Events Autumn 2015
One Day Events Search Solutions 2015: The groups annual practitioner based meeting, with an associated tutorial day. http://irsg.bcs.org/SearchSolutions/2015/sse2015.php. 25-26 November 2015, BCS Offices Covent Garden.
Editorial
Welcome to our summer 2015 edition of Informer! What a great summer, what an action-filled year, what a good number of reasons to keep celebrating. Cheers! Now, first point: ECIR 2017 will be held in
Dynamic Group Formation for Search Personalisation
In recent years, Search Personalisation has been attracting more and more attention in both academia and industry. Different from classical search methods in which the personalisation is not taken into account, personalised search engines utilise personal data of each user to tailor search results to the specific user, which depend not only on the input […]
Benchmarking News Recommendations: The CLEF NewsREEL Use Case
Many online news portals display at the bottom of their articles a small widget box labelled, “You might also be interested in”, “Recommended articles”, or similarly where users can find a list of recommended news articles. An example is shown in Figure 1.
Search Solutions Tutorials 2015
Search Solutions Tutorials 2015 Search Solutions is the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group’s annual event focused on practitioner issues in the arena of search and information retrieval. The tutorials take place on Wednesday 25th November 2015 one day before the Search Solutions. The tutorials offer conference attendees and local participants a stimulating and informative selection […]
Call for bids to host the ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR) 2017 and 2018
Call for bids to host the ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR) in 2017 and 2018: http://sigir.org/general-information/hosting-ictir/ The International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR) provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of research related to the foundational aspects of Information Retrieval (IR), including, for example, new […]
Call for nominations: Karen Spärck Jones award 2015
Microsoft BCS/BCS IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award 2015 – An award to commemorate Karen Spärck Jones Karen was a Professor Emerita of Computers and Information at the University of Cambridge and one of the most remarkable women in computer science. Her contributions to the fields of Information Retrieval (IR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), especially with […]
Events Summer 2015
One Day Events Search Solutions 2015: The groups annual practitioner based meeting, with an associated tutorial day. http://irsg.bcs.org/SearchSolutions/2015/sse2015.php. 25-26 November 2015, BCS Offices Covent Garden. Conferences/Workshops SIGIR 2015: The 38th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference. The big conference in IR. 9-13 August 2015, Santiago, Chile. http://sigir2015.org/
Editorial
Welcome back! It’s April and another ECIR has just passed, one full of workshops. tutorials, wine tastings, schnitzel, excellent keynote talks, more schnitzel, more great talks. We will bring you the latest ECIR news in this edition of Informer (among many other things).
Dynamic Information Retrieval Modeling
Change is at the heart of a modern Information Retrieval system. Advances in IR interface, personalization and ad display demand models that can intelligently react to users and their context in real time. Many of the current problems in IR research can be attributed to dynamic systems, for instance, in session search or recommender systems. The […]
Understanding professional use of complex search strategies
Do you find yourself at work staring at a jumble of text like this: ((((curtiss) NOT (curtis))) OR (((curtiss-* OR ~Curtiss-Wright* OR curtiss NEAR/1 wright*) AND ((model* OR monoplane*) NOT (prototype*))))) If you are, we suspect you’re writing a complex query as part of a sophisticated search strategy and we would like to find out […]
Conference Review: ECIR 2015
This year’s ECIR conference took place in Austria’s majestic, imperial capital city of Vienna. Hosted by the Information and Software Engineering Group at the Technische Universität Wien (the Vienna University of Technology), the conference ran from Sunday the 29th of March until Thursday the 2nd of April. The University itself (and consequently the recommended hotels) […]
ECIR 2015 Industry Day
The ECIR Industry Day in 2015 in Vienna followed a new format. Past ECIR Industry Days have generally followed the format of a number of talks, mainly from search majors, in parallel with the final day of the main conference. This year the Industry Day was run after the main conference with the focus being […]
Events Spring 2015
Conferences/Workshops ICAES15: Third International Workshop on Intelligent Context-Aware Enterprise Systems. Of interest to members working in the area of context and search.13-16 May 2015. Gwangju, South Korea, https://sites.google.com/site/icaes15/ WWW 2015: 24th International World Wide Web Conference. The major web conference with themes on search. 18-22 May 2015, Florence, Italy. http://www.www2015.it/
Editorial
Happy New Year and welcome to a new edition of Informer! This time we offer you a special edition, a Conference Reviews Edition. Nothing but conference reviews, how does that sound? Well, let us know and we will listen …
Conference Review: Search Solutions 2014
Search Solutions 2014 took place on November 27th at the BCS headquarters in Covent Garden. The event attracted a slightly larger crowd than in recent years. In fact, Search Solutions 2014 was completely booked out this year with 80 attendees from a wide range of different companies, research labs and universities. As in previous years, the […]
Conference Review: IRFC’2014 and 3rd Open Interdisciplinary MUMIA Conference
The 3rd Open Interdisciplinary MUMIA Conference and 7th Information Retrieval Facility Conference (IRFC’2014) was held at Aalborg University Copenhagen, Denmark on 11-12 November 2014. The conference is a continuation of the symposia and conferences of the former Information Retrieval Facility and has since 2012 been co-organised with the IC1002 MUMIA COST action on Multilingual and […]
Conference Review: Digital Libraries 2014
The joint conference on Digital Libraries 2014 – ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2014) and the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries Conference(TPDL 2014). The conference was held between 8th and 12th September 2014 at Milton Court in the Barbican Centre (main conference) and City University London (tutorials, workshops and doctorial consortium). We […]
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