By Udo Kruschwitz on May 5, 2018
Perhaps low recall but high precision at ECIR 2018
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 to the effort put in by IRSG committee member Craig Macdonald. Thanks for that! Furthermore, we have forged a closer link with the Information Retrieval journal. Exciting times!
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By Tony Russell-Rose on May 3, 2018
Image by PublicCo via Pixabay [CC0 Creative Commons]
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, and how they combine to form a coherent information journey. In this post, we take a closer look the principles that govern how to propagate the user’s navigational context from one phase to the next, and how those transitions shape the search experience.
At this point you may be thinking: ‘But what navigational context is there, apart from keywords?’ Of course, for many simple (aka web) search experiences that’s all there is: a handful of keywords in the opening game that are then echoed in the middle game. But many professional search applications (such as those used by lawyers, scientists, information professionals, etc.) make a virtue of offering a relatively complex opening game in which the user is invited to articulate the full extent of their information need in the form of a complex, pre-coordinated query. In these cases, the full detail of that navigational context needs to be propagated to the middle game in a manner that makes its presence transparent and its effects easily editable.
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By Parth Mehta on April 26, 2018
ECIR 2018 in Grenoble – what a spectacular setting
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 the post-conference hours. Éric Gaussier (University Grenoble Alpes), Lorraine Goeuriot (University Grenoble Alpes) and Georges Quénot (CNRS) were the general chairs for ECIR 2018.
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By Samuel Dodson on April 26, 2018
ASIRF Attendees visiting Dagstuhl ruins on arrival day.
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 students and 8 lecturers, representing 4 continents and 13 countries.
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By Trung Huynh on April 25, 2018
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. As in other bag-of-word models, structural nature of languages does not account for the models’ inferences. We hypothesise that by using structural architectures, specifically recurrent neural networks, derived word representations contain properties learned from the preserved sequential nature of the input text. Read more…
By Andy Macfarlane on March 4, 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. 28 May- 1 June 2018, Luxembourg, Luxembourg. http://ciaonetwork.org/eewc2018
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