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Spring 2020

Editorial

By Martin White on 10th May 2020

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 worked very well indeed. What is important about this issue is not just the comments about the content of the conference but also the additional insights into the management of virtual conferences.

This issue starts with the ECIR 2020 contributions from Joao Magalheis  and his colleagues providing an overview of the conference, a summary of the scientific sessions and an initial analysis of the participants. Then follows their reflections of the challenges and successes of the virtual event. Udo Kruschwitz reports on the Doctorial Symposium at ECIR 2020, I have contributed notes on two of the three keynotes (the third will appear in the next issue) and Andy MacFarlane reflects on the role of ontologies in information retrieval. Of course a benefit of a virtual conference is that it overcomes the costs and time or travel. I asked one of my MBA students, Stephanie Segura Rodas, to comment on the virtual conference experience from her home office in Lima, Peru. You can’t get much farther away than that! Ingo Fromholtz has contributed a report on the BIR conference that was running in parallel with ECIR 2020.

A detailed account of how the virtual workshops were managed has also been published.

And there is more. I asked Andy Macfarlane to write a note on the research he has led on the impact of dyslexia on how people with this cognitive condition manage with search applications. Around 1 in 8 people have some form of the condition and yet it is only over the last few years that it has been recognized as a major issue. Andy has also contributed his usual comprehensive list of events, though this is now inevitably out-of-date as on-site events are cancelled, moved or virtualized.  Hopefully the annual Strix Award lecture will take place in November. Frank Hopfgartner reviews a book on project management published by the British Computer Society. Finally in a conference special issue I thought it might be of interest to mark the first UK information retrieval conference which took place at the Royal Society in November 1979. In a new feature all the contributors are listed.

42nd ECIR 2020: The 1st Online IR Conference – An overview

By Joao Magalheis on 10th May 2020

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 first online IR conference ever.

The conference was organized by Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain — in cooperation with the British Computer Society’s Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS-IRSG). It was supported by the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (ACM SIGIR), Bloomberg, Amazon, Salesforce, TextKernel, NTENT, Google, and Levi Strauss.

The Organizing Committee was João Magalhães, Pablo Castells, Emine Yilmaz, Joemon Jose, Mário J. SIlva, Nicola Ferro, Flávio Martins, Nuno Correia, Ana Freire, Edleno Moura, Pável Calado, Stefan Rueger, Suzan Verberne, Suzane Little, Sérgio Nunes, Laura Dietz, Allan Hanbury, Vanessa Murdock, Bruno Martins, Carla Teixeira Lopes, Ricardo Campos, Dyaa Albakour, Rui Nóbrega and Filipa Peleja.

The ECIR 2020 program boasted a variety of novel works from contributors from all around the world and also provided a platform for information retrieval-related (IR) activities from the CLEF Initiative. In addition, a new collaboration was instated between BCS-IRSG and the Information Retrieval Journal, whereby selected papers from the journal were presented at the conference, and a selection of ECIR 2020 papers were invited to submit an extended version for publication in a special issue of the journal.

ECIR 2020 was a memorable conference. It started as an opportunity to bring a core IR conference to Portugal for the first time, but circumstances changed the initial plan drastically. In the process, we all learned a lot with a new setup, more distant, but also more inclusive. The online format showed that there is an interest in this type of online participation and offline viewing of scientific papers.

In the end, despite all obstacles, ECIR 2020 was a wonderful event. We wish to thank all the IR community: authors, contributors, session chairs and participants that engaged with ECIR 2020.

Acknowledgements. ECIR 2020 was sponsored by: Bloomberg, Amazon, Salesforce, Google, Textkernel, Ntent, Levi Strauss, Signal AI, SIGIR, and Springer. We thank them all for their support and contributions to the conference. We also would like to thank David Semedo and Javier Sanz-Cruzado who helped to manage the Zoom Webinars.

ECIR 2020 – The scientific programme

By Joao Magalheis on 10th May 2020

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) and 12 invited CLEF papers. All submissions were peer reviewed by at least three international Program Committee members to ensure that only submissions of the highest quality were included in the final program. The acceptance decisions were further informed by discussions among the reviewers for each submitted paper, led by a senior Program Committee member. A call for reviewers was set forth aiming to strengthen and update the Program Committee, integrating and catching up with both new and accomplished reviewing workforce in the field.

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ECIR 2020 – The participants

By Joao Magalheis on 10th May 2020

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 we had the KSJ Award Keynote, on the third day the keynote was followed by the Best Paper Awards ceremony, and on the last day the panel was the highlight.

In terms of participation the following table breaks down the participation numbers into unique viewers in Zoom and YouTube Live, the maximum number of concurrent viewers in Zoom and YouTube Live, and the ECIR 2020 YouTube cumulative number of unique viewers in the first 20 days after the conference. Note that we are not counting the number of views of the pre-recorded short paper and demo paper views.

It is very comforting to see how ECIR 2020 was well received by the community: we had a peak number of unique viewers of 384 in Zoom and 221 in YouTube. Considering all the time zones, we are very happy with these figures. Also, the second day of the main conference (April 16) shows a trend that we confirmed from attendees’ feedback: a considerable number of people preferred to watch the talks on YouTube instead of Zoom.

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ECIR 2020 – Delivering a virtual conference

By Joao Magalheis on 10th May 2020

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 only alternative to uphold ECIR 2020, we repurposed our goals and priorities now considering this perspective. In compensation for the lack of physical interaction, we saw an opportunity to maximize the visibility, participation and impact of the conference by leveraging the lack of physical barriers. In order to further amplify this potential, we decided to make the conference and proceedings open for non-authors.

Below, we list the key aspects that we believe to have made or will make a difference.

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ECIR 2020 – Doctorial Consortium report

By Udo Kruschwitz on 10th May 2020

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 the first time) to the community outside their home university. One of the benefits is that students whose contributions have been accepted get teamed up with a more senior researcher or academic who serves as their mentor — with the result that both mentor and mentee can learn something!

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ECIR 2020 – Some notes on the keynotes

By Martin White on 10th May 2020

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 Covid19 virus would mean that a virtual event was the only option. This was good news for me personally as it meant I could now attend the sessions! Overall it was a very impressive event, not just in terms of the quality of the papers but in the way in which the conference was managed by the Conference Committee. The timing was very good, and most of the presenters recognized the importance of a focused presentation. I did find it difficult to be certain about the schedule of short papers on YouTube and the Q&A sessions suffered from the fact that Zoom offers Chat for text questions and the Raise Your Hand option that enabled the question to be asked in audio in real-time and to me it was unclear what was the best (for the chair and the speaker) to use.

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ECIR 2020 – The role of knowledge in supporting IR applications

By Andy Macfarlane on 10th May 2020

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 searches can be broadened out or narrowed down to the user needs for better search performance. However it is specific domains where the benefit can be mostly usefully accrued.

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ECIR2020 – A view from Peru

By Stephanie Segura Rodas on 10th May 2020

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 of the conference. All essential information was there such as the list for presentations, papers and zoom rooms. Since I connected from Peru, the time zone was very important to know the time difference between Lisbon and Peru. My attendance was after lunchtime (Lisbon time). But, I am glad all the presentations were recorded and posted on YouTube. Certainly, technology has played an important part in this event and it gives a chance who missed the morning presentations to hear it again.

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Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval – BIR 2020 10th Anniversary Edition at Home

By Ingo Frommholz on 10th May 2020

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 at the crossroads of Bibliometrics and IR as two prominent fields of Information Science. The early pioneers were followed by scientists who often specialised in only one of these fields, with the effect that, over time, both communities drifted apart.

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Creating accessible search engines for users with dyslexia

By Andy Macfarlane on 10th May 2020

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 out is dyslexia – it is estimated the condition is found in around 10% of the population. Some will not know they are dyslexic, and may live substantial parts of their lives without diagnosis – if indeed they are ever diagnosed). Others may not want to reveal this invisible cognitive difficultly either because they fear that it will be career limiting or because they feel stigmatised by society. Either way search professionals need to consider methods and strategies to build accessible systems and services for dyslexic users.

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Events: Spring

By Andy Macfarlane on 10th May 2020

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.

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Tony Kent Strix Award Lecture 2020

By Martin White on 10th May 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

By Frank Hopfgartner on 10th May 2020

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 Third Edition of ‘Project Management for IT-Related Projects’, edited by Bob Hughes. The book has been published in August 2019 by the BCS and can be purchased online from the BCS Bookshop.

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And finally…from the Editor

By Martin White on 10th May 2020

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 of Information Scientists. The Institute was amazed at the level of interest in the conference from both attendees and from prospective presenters and was quickly expanded from one day to two.  It attracted over 200 delegates and was the stimulus for the establishment in 1980 of the IIS Special Interest Group on Word Processors and Information Handling.

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Contributors

By Martin White on 10th May 2020

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 Glasgow in Scotland.

Frank Hopfgartner is a Senior Lecturer in Data Science at the Information School, University of Sheffield and Head of the Information Retrieval Research Group. He is a member of the editorial board of the Information Processing & Management Journal.

Udo Kruschwitz is Professor of Information Science at University of Regensburg and a Visiting Professor Visiting Professor at the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering. He is the co-author of Searching the Enterprise with Charlie Hull and is an Advisor to Signal AI.

Andy Macfarlane is Reader in Information Retrieval in School of Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering, Department of Computer Science at City University of London. His research interests currently focus on a number of areas including disabilities and information retrieval (dyslexia in particular).

Joao Magalheis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science and Technology, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He acted as the Chair of the ECIR 2020 Conference Committee.

Stephanie Segura Rodas is an information security manager based in Lima, Peru. She studied for an MBA at the University of Sheffield in 2019, writing a dissertation on how multinational companies manage language diversity and the impacts on enterprise search implementation.

Martin White is Managing Director of Intranet Focus Ltd and a Visiting Professor at the Information School, University of Sheffield. He is the author of Enterprise Search (O’Reilly Media) and is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Information Management.