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… Continue reading Designing search: models and metaphors

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… Continue reading Search Solutions 2017: final programme

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… Continue reading BCS Search Industry Awards 2017

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… Continue reading Book review: Deep Text by Tom Reamy

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… Continue reading A framework for chatbot evaluation

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… Continue reading Call for Industry Day Proposals at ECIR 2017

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… Continue reading Searching for talent: the IR challenges of recruitment professionals (part 3)

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… Continue reading The IRSG Search Industry Awards

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… Continue reading Searching for talent: The information retrieval challenges of recruitment professionals (part 2)