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… Continue reading 42nd ECIR 2020: The 1st Online IR Conference – An overview
ECIR 2020 – The scientific programme
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)… Continue reading ECIR 2020 – The scientific programme
ECIR 2020 – The participants
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… Continue reading ECIR 2020 – The participants
ECIR 2020 – Delivering a virtual conference
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… Continue reading ECIR 2020 – Delivering a virtual conference
ECIR 2020 – Doctorial Consortium report
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… Continue reading ECIR 2020 – Doctorial Consortium report
ECIR 2020 – Some notes on the keynotes
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… Continue reading ECIR 2020 – Some notes on the keynotes
ECIR 2020 – The role of knowledge in supporting IR applications
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… Continue reading ECIR 2020 – The role of knowledge in supporting IR applications
ECIR2020 – A view from Peru
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… Continue reading ECIR2020 – A view from Peru
Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval – BIR 2020 10th Anniversary Edition at Home
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… Continue reading Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval – BIR 2020 10th Anniversary Edition at Home
Creating accessible search engines for users with dyslexia
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… Continue reading Creating accessible search engines for users with dyslexia