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 of practical training courses reflecting current topics and state-of-the-art methods in search and information retrieval. These tutorials will be presented by subject matter experts and will reflect the high academic and professional standards of the Search Solutions conference series.

We offer scholarships or fee waivers for unemployed BCS members looking to advance their careers: please contact the tutorial chair (andym@city.ac.uk) if you are eligible and interested.

Provisional Programme

Morning Session 09:30 – 13:00

Designing Search. Instructor: Tony Russell-Rose, UXLabs Ltd (Wilkes Room 3)

Search is not just a box and ten blue links. Search is a journey: an exploration where what we encounter along the way changes what we seek. But in order to guide people along this journey, we must understand both the art and science of user experience design. The aim of this tutorial is to deliver a learning experience grounded in good scholarship, integrating the latest research findings with insights derived from the practical experience of designing and optimizing dozens of commercial search applications. It focuses on the development of transferable, practical skills that can be learnt and practiced within a half-day session.

Crowdsourcing for Data Processing and Search. Instructor: Gianluca Demartini, University of Sheffield (Wilkes Room 4)

Crowdsourcing is a recent technique that has been used for different purposes: creating training data for machine learning algorithms, relevance judgements for the evaluation of search systems, sentiment analysis, language translation, etc. Today, crowdsourcing is being used in large companies to deal with low-quality data, to support automatic data integration systems, and to create annotations for improving search. In this half-day tutorial we will introduce the audience to micro-task crowdsourcing by demonstrating how to use existing platforms (e.g., CrowdFlower) and by showing example applications to data processing and search problems also when applied internally within an enterprise.

Afternoon Session 14:00 – 17:30

Text Analysis with GATE. Instructor: Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield. (Wilkes Room 3).

This tutorial takes a detailed view of key text mining tasks (introduction to NLP, linguistic pre-processing, entity and relation recognition, semantic annotation, indexing and multi-paradigm search) of textual content. It will cover both the latest state-of-the-art research and selected established methods and tools. It will show how text analysis tools and techniques can be used to assist with semantic search by providing extra information that is not explicit within the text itself, and an example of multi-paradigm indexing and search using GATE tools.

Evaluating search. Instructor: Paul Clough, University of Sheffield (Wilkes Room 4).

Search is a core component in many applications, including in the enterprise. Central to developing and managing search systems are questions of evaluation. After all, without evaluation we cannot quantify the performance of a search system or its value to end users and service providers. This tutorial will provide an overview of approaches commonly used to evaluate search systems from both a system- and user-oriented perspective. The tutorial will provide guidance on developing evaluation resources (e.g., test collections and benchmarks), a summary of commonly used evaluation measures (e.g., precision and recall), and how to conduct evaluations that involve people (e.g., task-based evaluation and A/B testing). Case studies will be used to illustrate the use of different evaluation approaches. In addition the tutorial will discuss wider evaluation issues (e.g., evaluation beyond the search box), current research directions in evaluation, and highlight some of the challenges commonly encountered during the evaluation of search solutions.

Registration
Registration fees (including VAT at 20%) are as follows (per tutorial):

Early Bird Rates (until 23:59 on 31-Oct-2015)
BCS member rate: £90
Non-member rate: £110

Normal Rates (from 01-Nov-2015 until 23:59 on 18-Nov-2015)
BCS member rate: £110
Non-member rate: £130

Closing Date for bookings is 23:59 on Wednesday 11th November 2015 at 11:59 pm. No more bookings will be taken after this date.

Cancellations & Refunds
Full refund available if cancellation received before 12pm on Monday 16th November 2015. Name substitutions will be allowed if notified before the closing date.

For overseas delegates who wish to attend the event please note that BCS does not issue invitation letters.

Panel:
Dr A. MacFarlane, City University London (Chair)
Dr M. Oakes, University of Wolverhampton
Dr C. Inskip, University College London