Editorial
I make no apology for making this an ECIR 2020 Conference Special Issue. It was a miracle that the conference took place at all given the short notice the organisers had that an in-Lisbon event was not going to be allowed to take place. The quality of the papers was uniformly high and the technology […]
42nd ECIR 2020: The 1st Online IR Conference – An overview
The 42nd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) was held on April 14–17, 2020, and brought together hundreds of researchers from all over the world. ECIR 2020 was to be held in Lisbon, Portugal, but due to the COVID-19 lockdown and travel restrictions enforced worldwide, the conference was held online. This made ECIR 2020 the […]
ECIR 2020 – The scientific programme
In total, 457 submissions were fielded across all tracks from 57 different countries — adding the papers submitted to workshops, ECIR 2020 broke the 500 submissions barrier. The final program included 55 full papers (26% acceptance rate), 48 short papers (28% acceptance rate), 10 demonstration papers (30% acceptance rate), 8 reproducibility papers (38% acceptance rate) […]
ECIR 2020 – The participants
In terms of participation, ECIR 2020 generated a very positive interest in the community. After moving to online only, a total of 1021 registrations were received. Each day of the conference featured a different highlight attracting different participants: on the first day, there was a plenary keynote session across all workshops, on the second day […]
ECIR 2020 – Delivering a virtual conference
Due to the short notice lockdown, the organization was suddenly reduced to very few people, with limited administrative support. Nevertheless, we stuck to the foreseen dates, and with only one month to carry out an entire transition to the online format, it was necessary to make many bold decisions. With an online event as the […]
ECIR 2020 – Doctorial Consortium report
The Doctoral Consortium (DC) at ECIR 2020 seems set to become a core part of the conference as for the second year running it attracted a good crowd of both submissions and attendees. The DC is a chance for early-stage PhD students in the wider area of Information Retrieval to present their work (often for […]
ECIR 2020 – Some notes on the keynotes
The European Conference on Information Retrieval https://ecir2020.org/ was originally planned to take place in Lisbon in the week after Easter. The timing for me was unfortunate as we had an important family event to attend in Glasgow. In the weeks leading up to the conference it became clear that actions being taken to mitigate the […]
ECIR 2020 – The role of knowledge in supporting IR applications
There was one very clear takeaway from ECIR 2020, a theme that to me kept occurring throughout many of the presentations at ECIR. This was the role of explicit knowledge in support applications, in particular the role of ontologies. There are many search technologies that can benefit from ontologies e.g. entity linking and recognition where […]
ECIR2020 – A view from Peru
I came across the ECIR2020 conference due to my will to learn more about search, information-seeking behaviour and information retrieval. I would like to share my experience in my first time attending such an important event. In the first place, the website was well design to facilitate people to find the registration and the structure […]
Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval – BIR 2020 10th Anniversary Edition at Home
Searching for scientific data and literature is a long-lived user need as academic search defines a complex task for IR researchers. IR veterans like Salton were already trying to enhance the retrieval process by including clues inferred from bibliographic citations. The development of citation indexes pioneered by Garfield proved determinant for such a research endeavour […]
Creating accessible search engines for users with dyslexia
Accessibility of systems has become a significant issue for professional who deliver software products and services, and this includes search technologies. Users are often reliant on these technologies in different contexts (think of Google), and therefore accessibility of information retrieval systems is a key issue for professionals. There are many disabilities, but one which stands […]
Events: Spring
Note: Due to the COVID-19 crisis some events have been cancelled, postponed or will be run virtually. We have provided information on each of the events with the current status at the time of writing.
Tony Kent Strix Award Lecture 2020
This is an advance notice of the 6th Tony Kent Strix Annual Memorial 2020 Lecture. This is currently scheduled for 22 November. The speaker will be Professor Ingemar Cox, UCL (winner of the 2019 Award) and the venue will be the Library of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London.
Book review: Project management for IT-related projects
Frequent readers of the BCS IRSG Informer newsletter will be familiar with our series of reviews of books covering recent advances in information retrieval and related areas. Today, we are widening our focus slightly by providing a review of a book on a more general aspect of IT. The first book of choice is the […]
And finally…from the Editor
All these contributions about ECIR 2020 have taken me back to what I am reasonably sure was the first UK conference on text retrieval. It was entitled Computer Packages for Information Storage and Retrieval and took place at the Royal Society in Carlton House Terrace on 12-13 November 1979. It was organised by the Institute […]
Contributors
Ingo Frommholz is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Bedfordshire. He received his PhD from the University of Duisburg-Essen in October 2008. Prior to joining the University of Bedfordshire in 2011 he worked at Fraunhofer IPSI in Darmstadt, Germany, at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany and at the University of […]
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