Editorial
Welcome and Happy New Year! “We had a great 2016. 2017 will prove to be even better” as an anonymous letter writer assures me … although he/she/it also assures me that the European Union is doomed and that I should respect the democratic will of the British people. What better way to start the year […]
A Case for Satellite Events in Evaluation Campaigns
Local conferences, such as TREC in North America, CLEF in Europe, and NTCIR in Asia, play a leading role in promoting information retrieval research by supporting novel campaigns and releasing datasets to share the latest research challenges. To gain access to these datasets, participants are requested to communicate their work in the form of working […]
A framework for chatbot evaluation
Unless you’ve been on another planet for the last year or so, you‘ll almost certainly have noticed that chatbots (and conversational agents in general) became quite popular during the course of 2016. It seems that every day a new start up or bot framework was launched, no doubt fuelled at least in part by a […]
Search Solutions 2016 – Matching the IR talent supply and demand in the industry
This past November 30th 2016, the British Computer Society hosted the Search Solutions forum at its London Offices. It was divided into 5 sessions with the following themes: 1. Understanding users and context, 2. Moving towards question-answering, 3. Beyond web search, 4. New modes of search, and 5. Panel session. Particularly interesting, was the panel […]
Call for Industry Day Proposals at ECIR 2017
This year’s ECIR conference will include an Industry Day, following very successful events at ECIR in recent years. The Industry Day will be held on Thursday 13th April 2017, immediately after the regular conference program. The Industry Day’s objectives are three-fold. The first objective is to present the state of the art in search and […]
Information retrieval, information literacy: a common cause?
What do information retrieval (IR) and information literacy (IL) have in common? At a fundamental level, they are both concerned with enabling users to locate and retrieve information, and thereby to meet their information needs; and the deployment of IL is partly dependent on IR systems. To a large extent, there is therefore a common […]
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