Tony Russell-Rose
Call for proposals for IRSG one-day events in 2023
The Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG) of the BCS invites proposals for the organisation of one day events supported by BCS. Proposals will be evaluated based on the organisational and financial plans and benefits to the Information Retrieval community. Important dates * Submission deadline for this round: 19-May-2023 * Notification: 02-Jun-2023
BCS/IRSG Search Industry Awards 2022
The BCS Search Industry Awards recognise people, projects, and organisations that have excelled in the design of search and information retrieval products and services. If you know of any people, projects, or products that deserve recognition, let us know by submitting a nomination. Alternatively, if you’re involved with something special yourself, you can submit an […]
Search Solutions 2022 Call for presentations
Innovations in Search & Information Retrieval Search Solutions is the premier UK forum for the presentation of the latest innovations in search and information retrieval. We bring together practitioners, researchers, analysts and end users to discuss the latest developments in the IR community and to share insights between research and practice. SS 2022 will be […]
Search Industry Awards 2021 – call for nominations
We are delighted to announce this year’s Search Industry Awards, celebrating the best search innovations of 2021. Presented by the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the BCS, these awards recognize people, projects, and organizations that have excelled in the design of search and information retrieval products and services. If you know of any people, projects, […]
BCS Search Industry Awards 2021
We are delighted to announce this year’s Search Industry Awards, celebrating the best search innovations of 2021. Presented by the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the BCS, these awards recognize people, projects, and organizations that have excelled in the design of search and information retrieval products and services. If you know of any people, projects, […]
What’s wrong with Boolean strings?
In our previous posts we explored some of the challenges involved in formulating complex Boolean strings and expressions, and reviewed six of the more innovative alternative solutions. Each of these offers its own unique perspective on how to solve such problems, and their pioneering efforts provide us with a rich set of design insights and principles. In this brief […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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: final programme
SEARCH SOLUTIONS 2017 Wednesday 29th November BCS London HQ, Covent Garden *** Early Bird Registration ends October 31st*** Search Solutions is the premier UK forum for presentation of the latest innovations in search and information retrieval. In contrast to other major industry events, Search Solutions aims to be highly interactive, with attendance strictly limited. The […]
BCS Search Industry Awards 2017: final call for nominations
As October draws to a close don’t forget that nominations for the 2017 BCS Search Industry Awards close on November 1st. So if you’re thinking of applying, or nominating someone, now is the time to submit your application. Further details below. See you at the awards ceremony!
BCS Search Industry Awards 2017
As you may recall, last year we launched the inaugural Search Industry Awards programme, which attracted nominations from across the globe and culminated in a memorable awards ceremony at Search Solutions 2016. My colleagues and I are delighted therefore to launch this year’s Search Industry Awards, celebrating the best search innovations of 2017. Presented by […]
Book review: Deep Text by Tom Reamy
When I started the London Text Analytics meetup group some seven years ago, ‘text analytics’ was a term used by few, and understood by even fewer. Apart from a handful of enthusiasts and academics (who preferred the label of “natural language processing” anyway), the field was either overlooked or ignored by most people. Even the […]
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 […]
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 […]
Searching for talent: the IR challenges of recruitment professionals (part 3)
And finally… here’s the third installment of my trilogy of posts on the information retrieval challenges of recruitment professionals. The background to this (in case you missed the previous two) is that a few months ago I published a post describing our InnovateUK-funded research project investigating professional search strategies in the workplace. As you may […]
The IRSG Search Industry Awards
As you may know, for many years the IRSG has awarded prizes to its members in various forms, e.g. the Karen Sparck Jones award, best paper at ECIR, etc. These awards help create a sense of community and provide recognition to individual members for their work. However, the current awards programme is aimed almost exclusively […]
Searching for talent: The information retrieval challenges of recruitment professionals (part 2)
A while ago I published a post describing our InnovateUK-funded research project investigating professional search strategies in the workplace. As you may recall, we surveyed a number of professions, and the one we analyzed first was (cue drum roll)… recruitment professionals. It’s a profession that information retrieval researchers haven’t traditionally given much thought to (myself […]
Searching for talent: The information retrieval challenges of recruitment professionals (part 1)
A few months ago I published a post describing our InnovateUK research project investigating professional search strategies in the workplace. I’m pleased to say that the project has now completed, and we are currently analyzing the results. As you may recall, we surveyed a number of professions, and the one we examined first is (cue […]
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:
Mining search logs for usage patterns (pt 2)
In a previous post I discussed some initial investigations into the use of unsupervised learning techniques (i.e. clustering) to identify usage patterns in web search logs. As you may recall, we had some initial success in finding interesting patterns of user behaviour in the AOL log, but when we tried to extend this and replicate […]
Mining search logs for usage patterns (Part 1)
As I mentioned in a previous post I’ve recently been looking into the challenges of search log analysis and in particular the prospects for deriving a ‘taxonomy of search sessions’. The idea is that if we can find distinct, repeatable patterns of behaviour in search logs then we can use these to better understand user […]
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