Editorial
Welcome to the Autumn 2018 edition of Informer! What a great time of the year, the days get shorter, the nights get colder, the Pound drops further. Happy days. You can be happy too if you do not miss our early-bird deadline to register for our annual practitioners’ event – Search Solutions! We have been running […]
Visualizing search strategies (part 2)
In our last post we reviewed some of the issues involved in developing effective solutions to complex search problems, and explored some of the challenges involved in formulating and representing Boolean strings and expressions. In particular, we explored the contribution of three experimental systems which aimed to offer an alternative to the conventional approach exemplified by line-by-line query builders and ‘advanced […]
BCS Search Industry Awards 2018: final call for nominations
On behalf of the BCS IRSG I am delighted to announce this year’s Search Industry Awards, celebrating the best search innovations of 2018. Presented by the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the BCS, these awards recognize people, projects, and companies that have excelled in the design of search and information retrieval products and services. If you know of […]
Conference Review: Autumn School for Information Retrieval and Information Foraging 2018
The Autumn School for Information Retrieval and Information Foraging (ASIRF) is a five-day intensive seminar held in mid-September at Schloss Dagstuhl in Saarland, Germany. In 2018, 20 people from five different countries engaged in a series of lectures, tutorials, and project-based work with internationally recognized scholars who specialize in information retrieval and information seeking behaviour.
Events Autumn 2018
One Day Events DIR2018: The Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval workshop 2018. 23 November 2018. Leiden, the Netherlands. http://dir2018.nl/ Our annual search solutions event will take place on Tuesday 27th November 2018, with tutorials taking place one day beforehand on Monday 26th November 2018 https://irsg.bcs.org/SearchSolutions/2018/sse2018.php
Editorial
Welcome to the Summer 2018 edition of Informer! We are back with a mix of news, reports and reminders, all from the world of search. Did I say reminder? If you are planning to host the top European Information Retrieval conference in 2020, then you have until Friday next week to hand in your bid. […]
Visualizing search strategies
According to the IDC whitepaper, The High Cost of Not Finding Information, knowledge workers spend 2.5 hours per day searching for information. Whether they eventually find what they are looking for or just stop and make a sub-optimal decision, there is a high cost to both outcomes. The recruitment industry, for example, relies on Boolean search as the […]
CfP: Workshop on Ethics, Privacy, Transparency and Bias in Information Retrieval in Sheffield
More than ever before, information, algorithms and systems have the potential to influence and shape our experiences and views. Especially in the context of information retrieval and recommender systems, an awareness and understanding of areas, such as algorithmic accountability, transparency, governance and bias, are becoming increasingly important. Recent cases in the news and media have […]
SIGIR 2018 Review
The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval took place at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor July 8th – 12th 2018. As usual, the conference was highly competitive, with a 21% acceptance rate for long papers! For the first time, China surpassed the USA with most accepted papers. […]
Information Retrieval in the Workplace: a comparison of professional search practices
If you are interested in professional search and applications of IR in the workplace, you may be interested in a paper titled ‘Information Retrieval in the Workplace: a Comparison of Professional Search Practices‘ in Information Processing & Management. This work is a collaboration with Tony Russell-Rose and Leif Azzopardi, and uses a common research protocol to investigate and compare […]
Playing our way to understanding language: Workshop report for Games4NLP at LREC’18
Fresh back from Miyazaki, Japan and my mind is buzzing with new ideas about how language researchers can leverage the power of games to create and annotate language resources. The Games4NLP workshop aimed to promote and explore the possibilities for research and practical applications of using games and gamification for the creation of language resources […]
Call for book reviews (Summer 2018)
Summer, sun, and a free book in your hands. What’s not to love about this!? We are again searching for reviewers for below books which have recently been published in Springer Verlag. Just drop me an email if you are interested in reviewing one of these gems and a free copy will be send to […]
Events Summer 2018
One Day Events Workshop on Ethics, Privacy, Transparency and Bias in Information Retrieval in Sheffield. A one day event focusing on some very hot topics given current events. http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2018/08/cfp-workshop-on-ethics-privacy-transparency-and-bias-in-information-retrieval-in-sheffield/ DIR2018: The Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval workshop 2018. 23 November 2018. Leiden, the Netherlands. http://dir2018.nl/ Our annual search solutions event will take place on Tuesday 27th November […]
Editorial
Welcome to our Spring 2018 edition of Informer! Knowing the busy lifestyle of our readership, we made this a compact issue that should quickly get you updated on some of the things going on in the world of search. First things first, ECIR is ranked A in the CORE conference rankings! This is largely due […]
Designing search: managing the information journey
In our last post, we looked at the role of metaphors and models in search, and explored one particular metaphor that was valuable for both its simplicity and utility: the chess metaphor. This simple notion helps us frame and structure the search experience in a way that allows us to better understand the stages involved, […]
ECIR 2018 Conference Review
The 40th edition of European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2018, was held in the picturesque city of Grenoble, France. The conference was hosted in Minatec, which boasts of a nice view of the Alps right from the conference venue. A perfect weather and central location meant the attendees could indulge in some sightseeing in […]
Conference Review: Autumn School for Information Retrieval and Information Foraging 2017
The Autumn School for Information Retrieval and Information Foraging (ASIRF) took place at Schloss Dagstuhl in Saarland (a Southwest German state) between October 1st and 6th, 2017. The School covered user- and system-oriented information retrieval (IR), with lectures given by leading researchers in the field—including Norbert Fuhr, a Salton Award winner. ASIRF was attended by 24 […]
Learning word representations with sequential modelling
Word representations have been learned by matrix factorisation methods or methods that optimise for similar goals (Levy et al. 2015). However these methods are limited to exploiting only co-occurrence statistics or bag-of-word features. Nevertheless these methods are usually so computationally efficient that they can be trained with huge corpora that may contain billions of words. […]
Events Spring 2018
One Day Events Watch out for our annual Search Solutions event in November! Conferences/Workshops Algorithms, Automation and News conference. Of interest to members working in the area of search and news. 22–23 May 2018, Munich, Germany. http://algorithmic.news EEWC 2018: Eighth Enterprise Engineering Working Conference. Of interest to members working in the area of enterprise search. […]
Editorial
Welcome to the Winter 2018 edition of Informer! Slightly later than usual, therefore we jump straight into the news section: Jochen Leidner (Director of Research at Thomson Reuters) and Frank Hopfgartner (Senior Lecturer at Sheffield University) are our new faces in the IRSG committee. Let’s give them a round of applause for their election success. […]
Designing search: models and metaphors
It’s often said that search is a conversation: a dialog between two participants that can be every bit as rich as human conversation. On one side is the user, with an information need articulated in the form of a query, and on the other side is the system, with its response in the form of […]
Search Solutions 2017: The Misinformation Age
Fake news, misinformation and toxic content were certainly the central theme to this years annual one day Search Solutions conference at the BCS headquarters in London. There were many other great presentations of the day to discuss as, but did not have the essence of relevance of the central theme of the day. MISINFORMATION The […]
Call for book reviews (Winter 2018)
Keeping up with the tradition of book reviews, we again seek reviewers for a number of recently published books in the fields of information and data science. As always, 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 – Winter 2018
One Day Events Watch out for our annual Search Solutions event in November! Conferences/Workshops IUI 2018: 23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. Of interest to members working on interfaces for search. 7-11 March 2018, Tokyo, Japan. http://iui.acm.org/ CHIIR 2018: ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval. Of interest to members working in […]
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