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
Category: Feature Article
Information retrieval, information literacy: a common cause?
What do information retrieval (IR) and information literacy (IL) have in common? At a fundamental level, they are both concerned with enabling users to locate and retrieve information, and thereby to meet their information needs; and the deployment of IL is partly dependent on IR systems. To a large extent, there is therefore a common… Continue reading Information retrieval, information literacy: a common cause?
Deep Learning In the News – Digest
It seems you can’t go very far these days without hearing something about Deep Learning. Here is a quick digest of some of the recent Deep Learning news and blog posts and a couple of pointers to potentially useful resources. This compilation was made possible thanks to Lumi News AI. Articles in this digest appeared… Continue reading Deep Learning In the News – Digest
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
Conference Review: SIGIR 2016
The International ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) returned to Pisa after 30 years for its 39th meeting. The conference was hosted in the Palazzo dei Congressi, a fantastic conference space just east of the centre of Pisa, alongside the river Arno. Organised by General Chairs Raffaele Perego and Fabrizio Sebastiani,… Continue reading Conference Review: SIGIR 2016
Third International Workshop on Gamification in Information Retrieval (GamifIR'16)
The 3rd Gamification in Information Retrieval (GamifIR 2016) Workshop, hosted at SIGIR 2016, started off with a highly insightful and timely keynote by Sebastian Deterding. Sebastian is a senior research fellow at the Digital Creativity Labs at the University of York, a founder and principal designer of the design agency coding conduct, a founder of… Continue reading Third International Workshop on Gamification in Information Retrieval (GamifIR'16)
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)
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… Continue reading Searching for talent: The information retrieval challenges of recruitment professionals (part 1)
News Digest in Machine Learning
Machine Learning (ML) is continuing to be a hot topic in industry with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo headlining in recent news. Here is a quick digest of some of the recent exciting events in ML and a couple of pointers to potentially useful ML resources. In A Huge Breakthrough, Google’s AI Beats A Top… Continue reading News Digest in Machine Learning