Informer – Page 13 – Archived newsletter of the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group

Book Review – Seeing with Fresh Eyes: Meaning Space Data Truth by Edward Tufte

I am concerned at the lack of interest in the IR search community in the design of search results pages and the design of the individual results snippets. You could argue that these are topics are out-of-scope and yet recent work on perceptual speed suggests that we should be taking more care about information design… Continue reading Book Review – Seeing with Fresh Eyes: Meaning Space Data Truth by Edward Tufte

Is there now a business in paid-for web search?

I would commend a blog post by Stephen Arnold on the future of paid-for web search, prompted by the release of Neeva which comes free for three months and then you pay $4.95 a month. (That fee is in very very small print on the home page!) Over the years several companies have tried to… Continue reading Is there now a business in paid-for web search?

On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?

There are few better ways of spending an hour than doing so listening to Professor Emily Bender, University of Waashington, taking about language models in a virtual presentation hosted by the Alan Turing Institute on 8 July 2021. The main topics in this excellent lecture (content, presentation and discussion) were Are ever larger language models… Continue reading On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?

IRSG web site upgrade

Work is now in progress with the migration of the IRSG web site into the new BCS Specialist Group web site style. For rather too long we have been somewhat out of step with the other Specialist Groups. We are anticipating that the new site will be launched towards the end of August. We have… Continue reading IRSG web site upgrade

Informer redesign plans

We are also planning to change the template of Informer, which apparently dates from 2008. However, this change will almost certainly not take place until the Winter issue in early 2022. The main reason for this is that the Editor is also acting as the Web Migration Manager and as the Conference Convenor for the… Continue reading Informer redesign plans

Events Summer 2021

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. Please check the URL of the event for further details.

And finally…..the pleasures and pain of inverting files

The topic of search index development came floating across my mind when reading the work of the IR Anthology team on identifying over 53,000 research papers. To take advantage of the outcomes of this research by a commercial search software company would almost always require its customers to re-index their document collection (which might be… Continue reading And finally…..the pleasures and pain of inverting files

In this issue

It has taken me a couple of years to realise that I have never actually written an editorial because when I took over from Udo Kruschwitz I decided to give you a summary of the contents of the issue. So the section has been renamed as ‘In this issue’ and you have no idea how… Continue reading In this issue

ECIR 2022 / ECIR 2023

The 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval will take place from 10-14 April 2022 in Stavanger, Norway. The web site is now up, highlighting that this will be the most northerly ECIR ever. If you are planning your 2023 vacation then you may like to know that ECIR 2023 will returning to Dublin, the venue… Continue reading ECIR 2022 / ECIR 2023